


We're just ordinary and forever, I think.

by 17826



Category: Arrival (2016), IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: (kind of), Alternate Universe - Aliens, Alternate Universe - Arrival, Arrival-typical discussions of linguistics, Dicking Around with Verb Tenses, Eddie-typical mentions of blood, Linguist Eddie Kaspbrak, M/M, Mike being forgiven and loved by his friends, POV First Person, POV Third Person, Physicist Richie Tozier, Reddie Centric, Richie-typical swearing, The Turtle CAN Help Us (IT), Time Travel, everyone else is background mostly sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:15:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23629852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/17826/pseuds/17826
Summary: Eddie knew how this story would end; he thought about it a lot. He also thought a lot about how it began, when the spaceship appeared in the Barrens and he was living hundreds of miles away, not even aware of it. And then, he crashed his car.Eddie is called back to Derry to try and talk to whatever he finds there.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 4
Kudos: 11





	We're just ordinary and forever, I think.

**Author's Note:**

> title is from Football 17776
> 
> this draws on both book and film canon from It and Arrival/Story of Your Life - i have adapted and wholecloth stolen passages from all 4 texts at different points
> 
> i also relied heavily upon several sources for research , mainly Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli , The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker , and the podcast Lingthusiasm , all of which i have also adapted / stolen from

I am about to tell you something. This is the biggest thing I'll ever get to say and I want to pay attention, note every detail. We are standing on the riverbank and it's late morning so the light hits just right on the sunbleached grass. It moves around you in the wind as an ocean of gold; I can feel it against my legs. The sky is blue and you're wearing that one t-shirt with the black trim that you say is orange but only because you won't admit that it's brown by now. Not dirty, you might say, just well loved. It's this exact moment.

Right now, we're in the middle of it all. I'm starting the story here because it's my favourite part, the gold and blue and brown, but there's other ways to start a story. We can argue about it if you like, we've got a few years yet. I know you like to argue, I know the predictability of it makes it no less enjoyable. I know a lot more than I used to.

I know how this story ends; I think about it a lot. I also think a lot about how it began, just a few months ago, when the spaceship appeared in the Barrens and you and I were living hundreds of miles apart, not even aware of it. And then I got a phone call, and I crashed my car.

Eddie Kaspbrak winced as he sat down at his desk. This was partly due to the chair, which was a run-of-the-mill wooden dining chair and not the orthopedic office monstrosity he was used to - you'll ruin your posture, shrieked the voice in his head - but mostly due to the blackly seething bruise on his left thigh, still tender despite the painkillers the paramedics had given him. Eddie himself seethed at the memory of his SUV being towed from the intersection and the indignity of the paramedic offering to call an Uber for him. He had probably been a bit excessive in his response to that, but he'd been a bit excessive in most things recently. He looked around the apartment still filled with unpacked boxes, stacks of them against the wall, two on the armchair, one on the far seat of the sofa.

His leg throbbed painfully again and he ignored it, ignored the tug between his shoulder blades as it pulled him back towards Queens, towards that little suburban house with its grey shutters and its fully stocked medicine cabinet. He knew that pull would win eventually. The voice in his head had stopped being his mother's long ago and now it was Myra's voice calling him home, sweet and insistent and so much stronger than whatever that dream had been which had finally tricked him into this intimation of bravery. The vaguest memory of it washed over him, light through water or maybe smoke, and he shook it off easily.

He opened his email and ignored the main inbox for as long as he could justify, deleting the junk mail and answering a few inane questions from his undergrads about the upcoming final. Yes, I will be grading on a bell curve; no, there will be no multiple choice. When he could put it off no longer, he lingered on the subject line for a few seconds anyway before clicking.

_To: Prof. Edward Kaspbrak k1782@columbia.edu_

_From: Mike Hanlon m.hanlon@derrypubliclib.edu_

_Subject: Field recordings 05/13 Derry MA_

_Hi Eddie,_

\- and no one had called him Eddie in so long -

_This is Mike Hanlon, from Derry, we spoke on the phone this morning. You might remember that,_

\- might?! Eddie laughed to himself, humourless and disbelieving. I might remember the phone call that ended in me crashing my fucking car? -

_but I don't want to take any chances with this. I don't know how this all works, I never have._

_We discussed the arrival of the ship and the screen in the woods. I told you about how I've been taking trips down there and trying to talk to whatever it is inside that glass as often as it will let me. I know you can help me with this, I believe you can._

_I found your email online, I know you hung up on me, I'm sorry to force the issue. Here are the recordings I have of our visitor:_

_ 0511sessiona.wav _  
_0511sessionb.wav_   
_0512sessiona.wav_   
_0513sessiona.wav_   
_0513sessionb.wav_

_I can't send videos, it's just not safe._

\- well then you're not getting shit from me, Eddie thought sourly -

_If I really can't convince you to come, please tell me anything you can get from these. There's one creature speaking, if it even is speaking._

_• Can you hear any words/phrases/sentences?_  
_• Is this similar to any sounds made by animals on Earth?_  
_• Does it seem like it's responding to me or not?_  
_• Could you learn this language without teaching it any English?_

_Like I said, I don't know how much of our conversation or of me you will remember, but I really need you to come to Derry. I won't lie and say you were thrilled about that idea earlier, but you said remote translation is never possible. If that's true, then I need you here. I know you don't remember me but_

\- Eddie rolled his eyes. You've said that already, he thought -

_we grew up just a few blocks from each other. But even if I didn't know you, you're the only specialist in monolingual elicitation in North America. It's like this was all meant to be._

_We need to know why its here._

_Please at least consider it._

_Love,_

\- love? -

_Mike_

Eddie sat back heavily, eyes landing on the .wav files. He read the email again. He reread it again. He repeated the end to himself, love, love, love, Mike. I know you can help me with this, I believe you all can. The guy sounded, like he did on the phone, fucking crazy. He opened the files just to avoid reading the whole thing a fourth time.

From his speakers, a man's voice asked, "what are you?" There was a long moment of crackly silence - a bad microphone, not calibrated for the proper ranges to record vocals, Eddie noted - then a heavy fluttering noise scraped from the speakers. It grew like a wave with no crest and cut off suddenly, deep and resonating. Eddie's throat closed up. As he fumbled headphones into the audio output, the man's voice came again, asking, "why are you here?" He clicked the jack into place just in time to hear another flickery noise, longer this time and ending in a noise like stone against stone. Definitely a different noise. Eddie's fingers twitched around nothing, a phantom reflex as his breathing became shallower. Another question, "can you understand me?" Eddie closed his eyes, dreading a response. The flutter scraped its way into existence this time like a plane struggling to take off. It was higher pitched, vibrating more. The recording ended. He toke off his headphones. He covered his face and he could feel himself shaking.

"What the fuck," he said into his hands. A statement. It echoed between his fingers and off the empty walls. "What the fuck."

He took as deep a breath as his body would allow him, lungs tighter than they'd been since that midnight confrontation with Myra. His eyes eventually opened and he replaced his headphones, clicking to the next recording.

One by one, with pauses for breathing and swearing between, he listened to the rest of the recordings. Each was of a similar length and consisted of the man - Mike - asking several questions and the creature, the thing, whatever it was, making its strange stone-flutter sounds. To his ear, some of them sounded similar, but he'd have to see spectograms to know one way or the other. They didn't vary much, or at least not the way Mike's voice did, not in the way Eddie's human brain was used to hearing. Despite Mike's worries about Eddie forgetting, Eddie did remember their earlier conversation but he hadn't believed it until now. This thing wasn't human.

He grimaced as he dialed Mike's number; he had no car for the foreseeable future. To get to Derry, he'd have to take a cab to the airport, which he hadn't done in decades, and the soonest he could feasibly find a flight wasn't until after the weekend. By then, whatever Mike's thing was, it surely would have resolved itself. I am wasting my time, he told himself as he listened to the phone dialling.

Derry was still in the mists of 6am when Eddie parked his rental in the furthest parking space from the road and he was glad of the unseasonably cold air as its forced its way into his lungs. Times like these, they sometimes needed convincing. He took his time as he unpacked his bags from the trunk, feeling the eyes of the Town House itself watching him. Something was behind those windows, he was sure of it, he just didn't know what it was yet.

Inside, he found the check-in desk empty and indeed the whole building sleeping with the dead air of empty rooms, like his apartment back in Manhattan. He left on instinct before shaking his head and going back in. I came here for a reason, he told himself sternly, and rang the bell on the desk.

Almost immediately, a man appeared from the stairwell-come-commonroom. "Eddie?" It was Mike, Eddie recognised his voice from the recordings. "Oh my God, it is you, you look just the same!" Mike caught him up in a hug, a grin on his face that somehow cleared the cobwebs from the whole Town House. His arms held the comfortable definition of someone who lives off the land. Eddie had never been hugged like this.

He extricated himself gingerly. "You must be Mike," he stuck his hand out, "I'm Edward Kaspbr- Eddie, yes, I'm- I'm Eddie." He tried not to visibly wince.

Mike had soft eyes as he shook Eddie's proffered hand. "Yes, sorry, I am Mike, Mike Hanlon, sorry for the enthusiastic reception, I'm just not used to- you are so familiar to me."

I've never seen you before in my life, Eddie wanted to say but another man appeared around the corner, this one as tall as Mike but gangly looking, as if he didn't know what to do with all his limbs. "Why didn't I get a hug like that when I arrived? Big arms like yours, I feel personally cheated."

Mike grinned at this other man. "Richie, c'mon, it's Eddie," he said, like that was an explanation.

The man fixed Mike with a look like he was getting used to Mike assuming knowledge he didn't have and yet was still annoyed by it, then he walked forward to offer Eddie his own hand. "You must be Edward Kaspbrak, I'm Richie Tozier."

"Call me Eddie," he corrected him automatically then felt his train of thought trip over itself as he thought, why did I do that?

"Language is the foundation of society," Richie said by way of reply.

"Sorry?" Eddie broke their handshake, having performed the perfunctory two shakes.

"It is the glue that holds a people together and it is the first weapon drawn in a conflict." With his hands free to gesture flouncily, Richie's voice became whimsical and Eddie's polite smile soured.

"Wise words," he said through gritted teeth.

"You wrote them," Richie stated the obvious.

"Yeah, it's the kind of thing you write as a preface." Eddie felt his frown deepen in direct response to Richie's widening grin, sure he was being made fun of and unsure why the back of his neck was prickling. "Dazzle them with the basics."

"It's good," Richie shrugged, "even if it's wrong."

"Wrong?"

"The cornerstone of civilisation isn't language," Richie adjusted his glasses cockily, "it's science."

In the voice of a parent who has long since accepted their child's flaws, Mike said, "Eddie, this is Dr Richard Tozier, he's a physicist at Berkely."

"What's a physicist doing memorising a book about endangered languages?" Eddie glared at him, feeling off-kilter and sure it was Richie's fault.

"Long plane ride," Richie replied, "I needed some pulp fiction."

Muttering something about schedules, Mike wasted no time in taking them down to somewhere called the Barrens to meet everyone; Eddie's heart began pounding as they trekked through the trees and he barely followed the conversation Mike and Richie were having over his head.

"So you found it 'cause you're in alien watch? SETI?"

"No, SETI is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The group I'm in, we were meant to be looking for more terrestrial stuff. Wendigos, mothman, that kind of thing."

"Oh, so just a straight up STI then?"

They walked for maybe 20 minutes into the forest before finding themselves on a rocky floodplain, a trickle of water approximating a stream coming from a large storm drain in the concrete wall to their right. To the left, between the trees, was a shadow that must have been the ship Mike had shown them pictures of; shaped like, as Richie had said, a Pringle, it sat just below the tops of the tallest trees so it couldn't be visible from the road, and its cold gray-black stone gave Eddie the creeps so he kept his eyes down and hurried forward. Ahead of them, grouped around a cluster of sewer manholes, were a few interconnected tents. They were large enough for Mike, who was half a foot taller than Eddie, to not have to duck to enter and permanent enough to have been standing for likely a week already.

Instead of following Mike in, Richie held the flap of the tent open and gestured for Eddie to enter. "Step right up," he said, impersonating a circus-barker, "marvel at a creature the likes of which has never been seen on God's green earth!"

Sure that if he opened his mouth to speak the terror curdling in his belly would overflow, but equally sure that if he stayed outside the ship would come over and take him into its belly and fly away, Eddie merely glared at him as he passed.

Inside the tent, they were met with a bewildering array of old laptops and what seemed like junk but was, upon closer inspection, a jumble of wires and frankensteined tech sprawling like tentacles across a few folding tables. Two men were sat in mismatched chairs and doing battle with what appeared to be a home scanner.

"Mike," said the shorter of the two, a vaguely balding man who didn't bother looking up as they entered, "m-m-materials analysis is coming through now."

Th other man twisted the dial on a nearby guitar pedal. "That should do it," he muttered then lent back on his chair to shout down the canvas corridor behind him, "are you getting anything?"

A woman's voice cheered unintelligibly from what Eddie guessed was the next tent over, and the first man jumped to his feet.

"F-fucking f-finally!" He disappeared down the corridor.

"Sorry," said the remaining man, standing and smiling awkwardly at the new arrivals, "we've been waiting a long time for that breakthrough." He was also tall - what was it with the behemoth dudes around here - but he was broad as well, heavy and frankly gorgeous.

"Ben, this is Richie and Eddie," Mike gestured to them each in turn, Eddie did a stupid little wave he immediately regretted, "who I told you about before, guys, this is Ben Hanscom. He's our engineer, arrived two days ago."

Ben did his own awkward wave, too far across the table to reach for a handshake. "Nice to meet you," he said with no hint of irony.

"Nice to meet you too," Richie said with more than a hint of something, eyes wide.

"Hanscom like Hanscom Engineering Co?" Eddie asked, finally placing the familiarity of the name.

Ben looked sheepish. "Yeah? You've heard of it?"

"We use your machines all the time at Columbia," Eddie said, "your field microphones mean more to me than my wife does." Something cold washed down his spine as he spoke, his old joke rolling off his tongue automatically and he bit his tongue before he could correct himself and come across as even more of an idiot.

Ben coughed out a surprised laugh. "Thanks man. So should we, uh," he looked at Mike, "go see about the analysis?"

They were introduced to the stuttering man, Bill Denborough the forensic analyst, and the woman they'd heard yelling before, Beverly Marsh the computer programmer. While Beverley-call-me-Bev was perhaps even more gorgeous than Ben was, Eddie was pleased to note that Bill was barely an inch taller than him and Bev was maybe even a bit shorter. Maybe I'm not the only human amount the giants, he thought. Leaving Mike to pour over the printouts Bill was brandishing, Bev lead Eddie and Richie to the next tent in the loop.

"Stan," she called ahead of them as they walked, "fresh blood, baby!"

They arrived in a well lit room roughly approximating a doctor's office, with a salvaged dentist chair in place of the examination table. Stan was, Eddie assumed, the tidy looking man leaning against the desk as he cradled a vat of coffee. Maybe 5'10" at a guess.

"You should call me Dr Uris," Stan frowned.

"Not gonna happen," Bev replied cheerily.

Eddie decided he liked Stan. "I'm Eddie Kaspbrak, I'm here as a specialist in monolingual elicitation." He didn't stick his hand out to shake, a habit ingrained in him from years of rooms that look like these.

"You're the linguist," Stan nodded. He looked at Richie. "Physicist then?"

"Richie Tozier, astrophysics and theoretical math," Richie stuck out his hand, "I'm also a doctor."

"Mazel tov." Stan toasted him with his coffee mug, ignoring the hand, then drained it. "Okay, let's get to it."

"To what?" Richie asked nervously.

"I assume we'll be getting our vaccinations updated and having blood tests and checkups to establish our baseline health." For the first time since arriving in Bangor International, Eddie wasn't afraid; this was home turf.

Stan looked at him with heavy eyes. Eddie had sent his medical records ahead, Stan could easily have surmised everything about him from his sprawling list of diagnoses. "Exactly. Not everyone is prepared to deal with what you're about to do. I'm going to get some blood from you and give you an immunization dose that covers a battery of bacterial threats." He gestured to the dentist chair. "Richie, if you'd take a seat and roll up your sleeves, I'll do you first because your, uh, history means your immune system might need extra help."

Stan was being as tactful as he could but Richie had a smile like a bulldozer. "He's referring to my cocaine phase during my postgrad," he announced to the room at large, "it really did a number on me, the doctors at rehab said."

Eddie stopped himself from rolling his eyes but only barely.

"On that note, I think I'll leave you to it," Bev clapped her hands together and checked her watch. "See you all in 84 minutes."

Eddie really didn't want to ask. "What's happening in 84 minutes?"

She grinned like a shark. "You're going in, of course."

You are taller than me. It frustrates me in a way I can't articulate, that you stretch above me and your arms seem to go on for miles before they reach the point where you are dangling the TV remote. I jab you in the sides to get you to contract and you do, but practice keeps that one arm behind you, out of reach past the vast wall of your shoulders. You have a broad back; it makes you look like you aren't as tall as you are.

I kick you in the shins.

You grin when you finally let me have the remote.

The mouth of the sewer stared up at them, darker than it strictly should be given the angle of the sunlight and the diameter of the opening. Light should be able to reach something in there; Eddie tried not to think about it but it really should.

"It's clean, I promise," Mike reiterated for the thousandth time, "these pipes haven't been used in decades, I've been down there twice a day for-"

"Sounds good to me," Richie interrupted, and in one hop he disappeared down the hole. The top of his head disappeared less than a second after it passed ground level; there was no sound of him landing.

Like when he'd felt the Town House watching him, Eddie was now certain this sewer was waiting to swallow him whole, to pull him down and never let him out again. It was a darkness that moved, an absence that was alive somehow and Eddie felt his chest close up, lungs empty.

"Eddie?" Mike out a comforting hand on his shoulder. "Are you okay?"

He tried to breathe through his nose, tried to subtly get his breath back, but it stuck. I can do this, he tried to convince himself, I can do this. What else am I gonna do with my life? Leave and go back to the airport and fly home to an empty apartment? Drive home to Queens?

"Do you want me to-"

Eddie didn't hear whatever Mike was about to say - he jumped.

The fall wasn't as long as he expected, maybe only two seconds tops, but it had the peculiar sensation of slowing as he landed so he didn't even stumble. It also wasn't pitch black down here; there was a greyish light somewhere up ahead and he found himself in a pipe large enough that Richie, a few feet in front of him and reaching upwards, couldn't even touch the ceiling on tiptoe.

"What the fuck?" Eddie gasped, finding his lungs able to accept the smallest amount of air once more.

"I know, right?" Richie jumped to try and reach the ceiling and his feet landed with an echoing thud. "This is so fucking cool." There was an edge to his laugh though.

On Eddie's right, Mike said, "straight ahead, guys." Eddie hadn't heard him land.

"Last chance to get off this ride, folks!" Richie's circus-barker was back. There was a moment of silence.

"Let's fucking go then," Eddie spoke somehow as he pushed past Richie and they went towards the light.

Mike had shown them photos of the glass when they'd arrived, even a few fuzzy pictures of the thing inside it but it had looked like a different indistinct creature each time so they hadn't been much help. Those photos were no preparation for the actual object they were faced with.

It was a smooth oblong maybe 10 feet tall and 25 feet wide, filling the chamber and emitting a pale glow but not a solid one; the light it gave off was fluid somehow, like the observation rooms around the largest tank in an aquarium. The light was moving, it had depth, like a chamber of gas that was lit from behind, but the glass was flat, evidently some type of screen.

Eddie looked for whatever was holding it up and couldn't see anything in the small gaps beneath it or above it, and the ends were too far away to tell but he knew in his gut. "It's just hovering..."

"It came from fuck knows where, maybe millions of light years away, it couldn't go an extra three feet to land on the floor?" Richie quipped but no one laughed. "Alright. Just trying to add some levity to this shit. I'll go fuck myself."

Mike was busying himself with the equipment tucked against the wall they'd just entered through, switching on machines and checking levels. Something like a Geiger counter began intermittently clicking in the corner. "Any minute now guys, it'll be here. It keeps a very tight schedule."

"That's polite of it," Richie said, voice slightly strangled. He was fidgeting with the straps on his backpack. "So what, it just, like-" he cut himself off. A shape had appeared in the mist, a fuzz of darker white that then became gray and then became grayer until it arrived, solid and huge on the other side of the glass. It was unlike the photos Eddie saw before; it was unlike anything Eddie had ever seen before.

The creature was huge, taller than Richie or Mike and wider than it was tall, and it moved with seven undulating limbs that were flat and paddle-like, four larger ones and three smaller ones between them at an offset angle. There was no head to speak of, only a clunky looking torso with nostril-like holes at regular intervals around the top of it, and they contracted in a rhythmic wave motion as it came to a stop. The torso seemed to be made of - or encased in - some kind of material that on any other creature, Eddie would call keratinous, but here he didn't want to presume.

He looked away after a long moment, fearing that otherwise he never would. He watched Richie, whose mouth was agape, eyes wide, until Richie looked back at him helplessly. He seemed to try and form words but then he gave up. Eddie looked back at Mike, who was watching him closely. He motioned with his head, telling Eddie, go ahead.

Eddie swallowed around his dry throat. He stepped forward uncertainly. He tried to speak, had to cough, and tried again. "Hello?"

Its nostril-hole-things flared and vibrated as it let out a fluttering noise, lower and louder than the recordings had suggested. Eddie deliberately held his ground even as Richie stumbled back.

"Hello?" He tried again.

It responded in a similar way, slightly scrapier this time. Eddie ran through half a dozen speculations of what the modification could mean before reminding himself how pointless that was. He could feel Mike watching him.

He didn't know what to do. He felt like an undergrad again, trying to seem like he knew something, anything; desperately unsure. "Hello."

The noise he got this time was completely different, high pitched and entirely aspirated, like air through a reedless clarinet. He had no idea what was happening.

Half an hour later, when they returned to the decontamination tent, feeling no further ahead, Eddie was still shaking. Richie was too.

"So, that's it," Mike said, as though about the start a speech, but he got no further as Richie laughed, hysterically, once, and promptly threw up next to the bin.

In 1770, Captain Cook's ship _Endeavour_ runs aground on the coast of Queensland, Australia. While some of his men make repairs, Cook leads an exploration party and meets the aboriginal people. One of the sailors points to the animals that hop around with their young in pouches, and asks an aborigine what they were called. The aborigine replies, 'Kangaru.' From then on Cook and his sailors refer to the animals by this word. It isn't until later that they learn it means, 'what did you say?'

Eddie thought about this story, often his opening anecdote to semester two of his intro to linguistics module, as he sat in the decontamination tent, 16 hours and 20 minutes since the first session. He could hear Bill and Mike and Richie on the other side of the canvas, muttering about him, already ready to go back in. He didn't understand why they were so excited. All the thing was doing was shouting its equivalent of kangaru back at them. Fuck.

He'd never felt like this before, never been so out of his depth. Even in Siberia, decades ago, trying to speak with people with whom he had no common language at all, he'd had an idea of what to do. All humans had bodies, all humans had hands or mouths. He didn't even know if this thing would understand pointing, which was pretty much the only universal in human communication.

He felt panic tightening his ribs again and winced, standing to walk around the small tent, rubbing his chest, digging his knuckles into his solar plexus. He hadn't even been able to sleep earlier despite his exhaustion from travel and stress.

There was the approximation of a knock on the canvas of the tent door. "Spaghetti man? You coming?" Richie called.

"Who's spaghetti man," Eddie deadpanned back, trying to keep his head from spinning. He concentrated on each seam of the tent in turn, counting them.

"Sorry, my bad, Professor Spaghedward," Richie poked his head in the door. "You coming?"

He made a noncommittal noise, unable to force an affirmative past his lips, and started putting on his backpack just for something to do with his hands. He couldn't look at Richie, couldn't tear his eyes off the floor.

"Hey," Richie's voice came a lot softer as he entered properly and made to put a hand on Eddie's shoulder, "are you doing okay?"

Eddie ducked out the way. "Yeah, yes, I am, I just-" his eyes caught on something tucked under the bench near his feet, something he hadn't noticed before. He reached down to grab it and, sure enough, it was a whiteboard. He swallowed again and looked up to meet Richie's eyes. "Yep, coming. Lead the way."

When they got outside, Mike look askance at the whiteboard, clutched to Eddie's chest like a child hugs a teddy bear. "What's that for?"

"We are never gonna speak its language," Eddie said honestly, "we can't make those noises and we can't waste time playing back recordings for half the session, that's a technology barrier we can't afford. But if that thing created that screen, if it understands its own technology, I'd be willing to bet it has some sort of writing system."

Bill narrowed his eyes. "So you're gonna try and learn to read and write as well? That's gotta take longer."

"No, it's obviously better, it's-" Eddie tamped down his frustration, reminding himself that it had been years since he'd worked with non-specialists. "Look, do you know the origin of the word Kangaroo?"

Bill looked nonplussed and Richie actually laughed, but Mike was a librarian. "Captain Cook asked the aborigines, what's that bouncy animal, and they said kangaroo but kangaroo actually means 'what did you say.' You want to avoid false starts."

"Oh we'll definitely still have false starts," Eddie said, "I'm just hoping we'll get through them sooner."

"Smart," Mike said.

Eddie tried not to be sarcastic. "Thank you." Judging from Richie's smirk, he failed.

"Okay, let's go then," Mike said, and dropped into the sewer.

Bill followed. Eddie was about to, but Richie grabbed his arm. "That kangaroo story's fake, you know," he said, either smug or just nervous and trying not to let it show. Eddie couldn't tell.

"I have two PhDs, asshole," Eddie said, "of course I know. It proves my point though." And with that, he stepped down into the dark.

When they got back above ground, Eddie was shocked to find his hands had finally stilled and his lungs had allowed him full capacity once again. The creature had writing, could project these mandala-like logograms onto the screen like it'd just been waiting for the invitation. Mike was practically bouncing with excitement, Bill kept slapping him on the back, and Richie hadn't called him a stupid name once in the last half hour. He could finally breathe.

"I," he announced, "am going to fucking bed." And he did.

I remember when I find you smoking a cigarette even though you told me you'd given that up. It's not the first time you've tried or that I've caught you.

"You'll get cancer," I say, even though you statistically won't.

"Ooh, promise?" You say.

"You're a fucking child," I say, "I don't know why I bother."

You needle at me until I admit I do know why I bother. You can get me to say anything you want, given enough time, even though I can be really fucking stubborn. We both can. Which is why I ask, "but you are trying to give up, right?"

You deflate a little. "I am, I am trying, it's just... You know it's hard for me."

"It wouldn't be so hard if you tried a controlled approach rather than just going cold turkey," I say.

"Compromises suck ass," you say, "I want it all or I want nothing, baby."

Eddie and Richie, having drawn the short straws, found themselves a couple of nights later waiting in the lobby of the Chinese restaurant for the group's takeout order. Despite having arrived in Derry concurrently, they hadn't spent much time together outside the screen room so Richie was taking this opportunity to try and make up for lost time. Eddie was, as best as he could, trying not to give him the satisfaction.

"How about Pocket Rocket?"

"No."

"The Kaspbrachiosaurus rex?"

"That's two different dinosaurs. Also no."

"Fine, what about, just plain ol' Eds?"

"Worst yet."

Richie huffed and flopped further into the shitty upholstery of the chairs they'd perched on. "I'm gonna do all of 'em then, Eduardo, you leave me no choice. If you legalised the industry, you'd get a say in the quality control, but if you let the market run rampant, you only have yourself to blame."

"So I suppose you're one of the staff reps in your campus's socialist chapter?" Eddie smiled, knowing full well that politics wasn't usually a light subject but he supposed it could be when you agreed on it. "Trying to get weed nationally legalised and all that?"

"Nope," Richie popped the p. "I am definitely best kept away from potheads and their associated dealers. I'm the STEM contact for the QSU but apart from that, nada."

Eddie raised an eyebrow. "QSU?"

"Queer Student's Union," Richie said, though something in the set of his shoulders betrayed a forced nonchalance.

"Oh," Eddie said, a second too late. "That's, uh, nice." He was unsure if Richie was coming out to him or not.

"I'm gay, by the way, if that, y'know. Yep."

One thing Eddie was quickly learning about Richie, was that you were never unsure for very long. "Okay."

There was an awkward silence for a moment.

"So you're, uh, you're not-" Richie stumbled over his words a little and Eddie prayed he wasn't about to ask it. "You got a wife?"

Thank fuck, Eddie thought, I never know how to tactfully turn down dudes. "Yeah, I do, we got married... oh God, twelve years ago now, holy shit."

Richie laughed and the awkwardness passed. "Time, man," he said, "it's a crazy thing. But congrats dude, not everyone finds their person that early."

Eddie smiled back politely as he steeled himself to say, we're separated and I'm gonna try my level best to never fucking see her again. His ring felt like ice against his skin and he opened his mouth but then the server called their number and they went to collect the food.

"So, we've established a means of communication," Mike said, once everyone was seated round the table in the mess tent, temporarily cleared of technojunk so the tupperwares could be passed around. Eddie sincerely fucking hoped no one had a cold but, as he was on his second gin and diet coke anyway, it was getting easier and easier not to think about that.

"We've established that we may be able to establish a means of communication," he corrected Mike. "We might get there. Very slowly."

Mike twitched his head as if to say, I want to acknowledge you've spoken but don't want to acknowledge that you have not worked the miracle of immediate translation yet. "Either way, we are now pretty sure it actually wants to communicate, which puts us miles ahead of where we were even two days ago."

"Cheers to that," Bev held up her beer and everyone joined the toast, bottles clinking against glasses against other bottles.

"Cheers to Eddie!" Richie grinned. Eddie met it with a sheepish smile of his own. Richie, he was surprised to note, was still drinking water.

"Like I said, this is gonna be very slow," Eddie cautioned again, sure they weren't grasping the magnitude of time he was envisioning.

"I have every confidence in you," Mike said.

"You're the best man for the job," Ben gestured with his chopsticks, "besides, we only want to ask one question right?"

There was a chorus of vague affirmations from the assembled group. Even Bev, who so far had shown good instincts for linguistics, had nodded.

"I'm not being fucking modest," Eddie said, "I-"

"It's cute when he rolls his eyes," Richie stage-whispered to Stan, who snorted into his rice.

Eddie glared at them all but mostly Richie. "Can I fucking finish?" A moment's silence. "I'm not being modest, there's just a million things to consider here, look-" He stood and turned to the whiteboard tucked up against the wall, clearing a gap in the gobbledegook numbers with his napkin and ignoring Bill and Mike's protests. He uncapped the pen and wrote in large block capitals, WHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE ON EARTH? "This is what we're working up to, right?"

The grumbling protests and laughter had cleared up. Everyone was actually focussed on Eddie's question for once. He felt like he was back in his lecture hall, in his element.

"Yes," Mike said, "that's what we're trying to ask."

"Okay, so -" Eddie went over the question mark a few times - "first, we need to establish that it understands what a question is, a request for information requiring a reciprocal response. Then -" he underlined PURPOSE - "we make sure it even has a concept of purpose, as in practical goal rather than divine calling, or if it is controlled by impulses it doesn't register as decisions, or even if it's part of a hivemind, 'cause remember, we don't know what the fuck this thing is. Yeah. And about that, 'you' is a very fucking complicated word, all pronouns obviously are, so we have to get this thing to tell us -" he drew an arrow from YOU and started a flowchart - "if it is a singular being or part of a species and then whether or not there are others of its kind in earth and then, depending on that answer, we need to get across that we mean the collective 'you', not the singular, because we don't really care what this one individual is doing here in Derry if there's a whole plan to take over the world about to pop off. And then -" he circled the whole question - "we need enough common vocabulary to understand whatever response it wants to give. All this, assuming it even fucking wants to talk to us." He sat back down in his chair, falling slightly harder than he intended.

There was a stunned silence.

Bev whistled, low and airy, like a mountaineer surveying a peak they're not sure they can conquer.

"Well, shit," Stan said, darkly humourous.

Richie put up his hand.

The whole table looked at him for a long moment.

"Oh, um, yeah, I have a question," Richie put his hand back down. "I was thinking about pronouns, or sort of, and, like, we keep calling it 'the thing' or 'it' or whatever, and I've seen enough Star Trek to know we should try and avoid relating to nonhuman beings as if they're human, particularly with respect to the gender binary because-"

"Richie, bud," Ben interrupted, not unkindly, "what's your question?"

"I think we should call it Maturin," Richie said, looking at Eddie instead of Mike, though Eddie wasn't sure really why.

"That's not a question," Eddie said. "Maturin like Paul Bettany in Master and Commander?"

"That's a terrible film," Bill interjected.

"Yeah, but like," Richie shifted in his seat, hands flat on the table, "so, in the book, Paul Bettany finds this new species of turtle and names it after Russell Crowe because they're in love, and I always thought Paul Bettany deserved something to be named after him, so like... Yeah, Maturin? It doesn't look like a Steve."

"I agree," Bev nodded, "it doesn't look like a Steve."

"All those in favour of Maturin," Stan said, "raise your hand."

Richie's hand shot into the air, shortly followed by Bev's and Stan's, then Mike's, Ben's, even Eddie's.

Bill looked around at them all disbelievingly. "It's a really, really terrible film," he said.

"Don't be homophobic, everyone wants to be gay on a boat." Richie waved his spare arm at Bill until he sighed and raised a hand. "Fucking unanimous, get in!"

Within the week, Eddie and Maturin had made great progress in expanding their shared understanding of what Eddie was calling Maturin B. After a few days of adjectives and using Bev's modified update to Praat, Eddie had concluded that the transformations in the logograms Maturin was producing did not correlate with the change in sounds it made, hence the dubbing of its spoken language as Maturin A and its written language as Maturin B. Stan even floated the idea that the noises Maturin made could be solely a by-product of its biology with no inherent meaning at all, but Eddie was coming to recognise certain sounds; one that signified Eddie, one that signified Mike, one for Maturin itself, even one for Richie. He had a bad feeling that the Richie sound was Maturin's favourite.

Their increasing vocabulary had allowed for a bit more information about Maturin itself too: it was the only one on Earth, the only one at all, so far as they understood, and it was from somewhere it described in simplest terms as _not-here many-planet_. Eddie hoped that as they continued their lessons, they might gain clarity in that, but for now they were assuming Maturin meant it was from a different solar system. Though this was what they had expected, Eddie had still felt faint talking that particular translation through with the others.

Each session with Maturin started with a language lesson where Eddie would point to or hold up various objects and name them, write their name on the whiteboard, name them again; in response, Maturin would produce an inky logogram using a pliable ink from one of its cavities and make a flutter-scrape noise. Eddie would try and recreate this logogram by hand, just to show willing, and they'd move onto the next word. Maturin proved to be a patient teacher and a willing learner. They'd even moved onto some basic verbs which Richie had agreed to demonstrate. 

Walk, Eddie wrote on a whiteboard, and Richie paced up and down the length of the screen, Maturin following alongside for a few moments before it returned to Eddie.

Jump, Eddie wrote, and Richie did, and Maturin made the hissing noise Eddie suspected might be a laugh.

Eat, Eddie wrote, and Richie took a bit out of an apple, prompting Maturin to back away into the mist then reappear with a gelatinous orb it rolled between its smaller limbs until it was absorbed. Richie and Eddie had shared a grin at that. Richie had illustrated each verb asked of him with a charming lack of self-consciousness, an attitude that left Eddie feeling both mellow and unhappy by comparison, a state more common to him than he ever would have admitted.

The second half of each session was dedicated to Richie, aided by Mike or Ben, sometimes Eddie, trying fruitlessly to find some way into Maturin's concept of math. They'd gotten so far as to demonstrate it definitely had one given that it could follow along and correct basic arithmetic, Bev's program for converting between base 10 and 7 systems proving it's worth. But anything beyond that, even basic geometry or algebra, and Maturin seemed lost, constantly repeating a gravelly flutter. The optimistic interpretation: Maturin was asking for further clarification, trying to find common ground. Pessimistic interpretation: it had a nagging cough.

Eddie privately thought it unfair Richie was having so little luck with Maturin's math skills, especially when he'd been so instrumental in a lot of the linguistic breakthroughs. Most recently, when Eddie had said he was struggling to understand the significance of the way Maturin changed the orientation of its logograms, Richie had asked, "have you noticed that when it follows my walking, it doesn't change direction like I do? It just sort of goes back the way it came."

"I guess," Eddie had said, though he hadn't until Richie pointed it out.

"But that makes sense, it's got radial symmetry. Why would it have a sense of which way is forward when every direction is equally accessible? Their bodies have no forward direction, maybe their writing doesn't either." He had nodded as though impressed. "Highly fergalicious."

Eddie couldn't believe it; he was working with someone who modified the word 'fergalicious' with 'highly' and then used it to describe pioneering discoveries in nonhuman orthography. Actually, in context of everything else he knew about Richie, he probably could believe it.

He practiced Maturin B as he pondered the implications of what Richie had proposed. Maturin's writing did not rely on orientation the way human writing systems or visual languages did. Any English speaker would start reading from the top left of a page, anyone writing in Mandarin would draw a timeline from top to bottom. So, this language sacrifices the anchor of a consistent point of reference, what does it gain from that? Is it constantly dealing with some sort of ambiguity?

Eddie stares into space, not seeing the ugly pattern on the dingy bedspread, eyes unfocussing until the shapes resolve themselves into something else entirely, someone stumbling towards him like a drunk at the end of a long hard night.

"- Eds -"

Far away. Unimportant. He feels everything running out of him, all the frustration, all the confusion and fear... He feels so lucid, so clear, like a window-pane which has been washed clean and now lets in all the gloriously frightening light of some unsuspected dawning. If I had time enough I could have preached on this light, I could have sermonized: not bad, I would begin. This is not bad at all. But there is something else I- Eddie jerked upright, heart racing in that way only tripping on your way into sleep can induce.

He blinked to clear the haze from his eyes and closed his laptop, cleaned his teeth, and went to bed.

Eddie aired his concerns about the free orientation of Maturin B over breakfast with Bev and Stan a few days later. The three of them had fallen informally into being the linguistics team in the operation, partly by default as Richie, Ben and Bill were working on the physics and Mike was overseeing everything, but also by merit of skill. Bev had a keen ear and a working knowledge of language studies just through coincidence; they'd gotten to know each other as she adapted his existing linguistics programs to suit Maturin's needs, and Eddie was pleased to find she was conversational in Portuguese from a semester abroad. And Stan had more than just layman's awareness of linguistics thanks to his wife, a speech and language therapist back in Atlanta. He'd read some David Crystal, a little Steven Pinker, and of course knew about the anatomy of the human speech apparatus from his own studies. Outside of a qualified linguist, they were probably the best colleagues Eddie could have hoped for.

"So you think we might not be able to truly communicate in Maturin B," Stan surmised, "because of the way it arranges its sentences?"

"I'm worried we don't have enough in common for us to understand the context it comes from," Eddie said as he loaded bread into the toaster. "I'm worried that... We know Maturin's writing system is semasiographic right, but that doesn't necessarily mean A and B aren't codependent. More primitive sign systems can rely a lot on context to be understood."

"Like an X in a circle can mean 'do not enter' or 'press that right button on your controller' depending on context?" Bev asked. Eddie nodded. You really would eat my undergrads alive in an aptitude test, he thought frankly. "But Maturin B doesn't look primitive," she said.

"Well, simplicity is a relative and culture-dependent judgement, but no, I agree, each logogram obviously contains a lot more information than that."

Stan shuffled through the printouts in the center of the table, each showing one of Maturin's longer 'sentences'. Honestly, they didn't appear to be writing at all, they looked more like a bunch of intricate graphical designs. The logograms weren't arranged in rows, or spirals, or any linear fashion; instead, Maturin would write a sentence by sticking together as many logograms as needed into a giant conglomeration. "At risk of sounding like one of Mike's more pessimistic moods," Stan said slowly, "is there a chance that this isn't its real writing?"

Eddie met his eyes then looked back at the beautiful images. "You mean it isn't showing us a real orthography?"

Stan nodded. "We agree it must have a writing system, there's no way it could create the technology it has with only an oral tradition, but maybe it doesn't want to show us its real writing for some reason."

"Or it could be an illiterate using someone else's tech, humans do it all the time," Bev said grudgingly. Eddie knew she was firmly team optimist but all possibilities had to be considered here.

The three of them shared a commiserating silence. None of them really believed that. "Third option," Eddie said, "it's using a nonlinear system of orthography that qualifies as true writing."

"True writing?" Bev asked.

"I mean, as opposed to proto-writing, simple ideographic symbols, mnemonics, that kind of stuff." The more Eddie talked about it, the more he was sure he was right. "True writing is when an idea is encoded in a written system in such a way that someone else could look at it and reconstruct the original thought to as perfect a degree of accuracy as is possible."

"But you said there's no word order or prevailing structure to Maturin's sentences," Bev said. "It writes everything on the page down pretty much concurrently."

"Does that mean the whole thought is meant to be reconstructed concurrently?" Stan asked.

"Like no matter where you start reading, you end up at the same meaning," Eddie nodded. "I'm willing to bet that's right. Holy shit." He sat back, mind reeling at the implications of that. He realised he hadn't eaten his toast. He takes a bite.

I am so fucking mad at you right now. "I am so fucking mad at you right now," I tell you, "Jesus fucking Christ."

"Language," you admonish me, slurring the word together until it becomes a big sludgey exhale.

"You're Jewish," I snap.

"Eh," you wiggle your hand lazily; it lolls side to side unevenly, just like your head is doing, half in and half out the window. "I'm only in it for the bread."

"I'll tell your mom you said that, I swear to shit I will."

"Mmm," you hum. You've stopped listening. You're looking out the window, watching the trees and streetlights as they pass.

"Hey," I kick your shin to get your eyes back on me, unwilling to take my hands off the wheel. "Hey, fuckface, did you never consider that a lot of drugs are gonna produce adverse interactions with your medication? Did you even try to look it up?"

You shrug and you look like Atlas, the way you have to expand so much energy for such a simple, slow movement. "Dunno which meds I'm on anyway." Then you wince so I'm pretty sure I'm shrieking at you. Fucking good, I think, now you know what it's like for me in my brain these days. "I don't need to! I've got you for all that shit. Jesus Christ, Edsicle, can't you just get me an aspirin or something?"

I'm not like you, I can't move through the world like you. "You reckless asshole," I say, "why can't you just do things the way normal people do?"

"That would be boring," you say, and you continue in the same spaced-out, barely awake drawl, "I'm about to ralph, dude."

I pull the car over and hold back your hair as you retch at the side of the road; it's like ink on my fingertips and it's long enough that I can pull it back into a bun using a hair tie from my pocket. The bile you're ejecting is orange from streetlights and pop. When you're finished, you groan and refuse to stand up.

I sit so you won't have to lie alone in the cold grass and cradle your head in my lap. The vomiting seems to have helped a bit, your forehead doesn't have such a sickly sheen anymore. You mostly seem tired now. Tired and young. "I'll get you home," I say, but not really because I think you'll hear me.

Maybe you thank me or maybe you just sigh. Either way, I get you back into my car and I get you home and I am there in the morning when you wake with the king of all hangovers, to give you dry toast and an aspirin.

A few days later, Eddie was annotating the new vocabulary from the last session as it uploaded to the database when there was a knock on the- "wait, we don't even have doors," Eddie said as he pulled his headphones off. Sure enough, it was Richie looming over him. "How did you...?"

Richie mimed a polite cough and knocked again, his fist neatly rapping against thin air, and this time Eddie felt the tiny tremors from Richie's toes kicking the table leg while he did it.

Eddie tried not to smile. "Very funny."

Richie reacted like he hadn't heard him, looked this way then that, waiting on the porch outside a house he was used to entering promptly.

You dork. "Come in," Eddie tried to sound as beleaguered and disapproving as possible but even to his own ears he failed.

"Hi Eds, whatcha doing?" Richie crouched down and folded his forearms on the table, leaning his chin on them like a child.

"Well, I'm just-"

"Sounds good, great job, anyway," his hand shot into the air. "I have a question."

Eddie scowled. "What?"

"It's about your last report-"

"You read those?"

Richie flicked Eddie's nose as he lowered his hand and his voice slipped down somewhere south. "Of course, ah read everythin' written about ah friend Maturin, them's the rules." They were the rules; Eddie had read everything Richie had submitted, and everything from everyone else too. He'd just assumed Richie wasn't really one for rules. Richie's voice was back to his regular accent when he spoke again. "What's a semagram?"

"That's what I think should be the proper term we use to refer to the graphs in Maturin B," Eddie said. "I know no one else really cares, but 'logogram' implies each graph represents a spoken word and we ruled out that possibility weeks ago now."

"So why not use ideogram?"

"How do you know about ideograms?"

"I got Stan to write me a linguistics primer," Richie shrugged, "he seems to have more free time than you do these days."

Eddie shifted his weight, surprised. "Well, you're right, I'm referring to the kind of thing 'ideogram' is meant to refer to, a graph that represents a concept independent of any single spoken language. For human languages, that's your numbers and your airport signage and the like."

"So why not use ideogram?" Richie asked again, then twisted his head and squinted up to the right, the expression Eddie now recognised as his thinking face. "I guess those things imply a kind of aesthetic nature rather than a, like, linguistic one."

"Yes, but also there's a... A history to 'ideogram' as a term, a lot of old racists assuming East Asian alphabets must be less civilized than Latinate scripts just because they aren't solely phonetic in origin."

Richie nodded. "Good to not be racist to darling Maturin, I agree. You know you approach language like a mathematician, right?"

"It's almost like linguistics is a fucking science or something," Eddie said dryly and rolled his eyes when he was sure Richie was looking.

"Yeah, I think it almost is," Richie smirked. "But for real, you steer us round communication traps I didn't know existed, which is probably why I'm single."

Eddie had the distinct impulse to sit on his hands, to cover up the absence of a ring that he'd only just worked up the courage to remove. He'd been willing to bet Richie would point it out three days ago as soon as he saw it, but that was the closest they'd come yet to a direct reference. Eddie's throat felt like a cement cast of itself but when he spoke, it came out clear. "Trust me, you can understand communication and still end up single.

Richie was looking down now, watching his nails as they tapped a rhythm onto Eddie's desk, blue nail polish chipped and revealing the dirt underneath. Eddie watched them too, hypnotic in their rippling movement, not dissimilar to the strangely beautiful way Maturin moved. There were a lot of things about Richie that were strangely beautiful.

Eddie cleared his throat. "Is that- does that answer your question? 'Cause I've kind of got a lot to..."

"Oh, yeah, no, thanks, great," Richie stood quickly, back to gangly limbs and awkward angles now the moment had passed. He made to leave but aborted halfway. "Actually, I've come to ask- to give you early access to the eagerly anticipated Richie Report 32: Electric Boogaloo."

Eddie couldn't stop the grin this time. "Electric boogaloo? I thought you were saving that subtitle for a special occasion."

Richie beamed hitches back into place. "It is a special occasion, and plus also as well, it rhymes. You know Bill and I kept getting stumped by the frankly stupid gaps in Maturin's knowledge? Like, it can add and subtract or it can prove the prime number theorem, but, like, nothing in between? And it can recognise quantum loops, which we've barely theorised, and yet doesn't seem to understand the idea of gravity?"

Eddie tried to remember the last of Richie's reports. "You had the success with the periodic table last week."

"Exactly, yes, I-" Richie wiped half of Eddie's whiteboard clear in a single sweep before asking, "are you using this?"

"Oh, by all means, it wasn't important anyway!"

"Good." Richie ignored the biting sarcasm and drew a diagram:

"Okay, here's the path a ray of light takes when crossing from air to water. The light ray zooms along in a straight line until it hits the water, then the water has a different index of refraction, so the light fucks off in a different direction. You've heard of this before, right?"

Eddie nodded. "Never with quite the same level of artistic license though."

Richie's mouth twitched; he looked pleased. "Well, here's the interesting thing about the path the light takes, this path is the fastest possible route from A to B."

"Come again?"

"Imagine for me, Eddie my love, just for the chucks, that the ray of light - let's call him, I don't know, Richie - Richie lives at point A, and he's running late for a hot Grindr hookup with a super sexy electron - let's call him Ben and cross our fingers - who lives at point B. Our intrepid Richie plugs Ben's address into Google maps, and then Waze because he knows Google is lying to him, and Waze says to go this way." He added a dotted line to his diagram:

"Distance-wise, this path is a lot shorter than the path Richie was thinking of taking, so he gives it a go. But our poor protagonist can't travel as fast in water as he does in air, and a greater percentage of this path is underwater so unfortunately, by the time he gets there, Ben is already macking on some other lucky twink."

"That's one lucky twink," Eddie agreed solemnly.

"I know right? Now, the next night, Richie opens Grindr, another message from Ben, sorry babe, got distracted, you still up? So Richie tries again, and he goes with Google maps this time because fuck Waze, and Google maps tells him to go this way." Richie drew a second dotted path:

"Google gives him a path that reduces the percentage of his journey spent underwater. Great! So he goes off, fast as he can because Ben had sent some more pics and they had really riled him up, but yet again, he gets to Ben's apartment and some other bastard beat him there!"

"A different twink or the same lucky one from before?"

"Oh no, this one's a bear, I reckon Ben would be just as much up for some steamy bear on twunk action."

Eddie narrowed his eyes, considering that. "You think Ben's a twunk?"

"Stop distracting me. What I'm trying to say is, the route Google gave Richie is now too long to save time, even though there's less time spent underwater than the other routes." Richie tapped the pen against the original route once more. "So on night three, Richie takes the route he was originally gonna take, he gets there before any of the other hapless fools Ben's been stringing along , and gets the good dicking he deserves. Ergo, any hypothetical path would require more time to traverse than the one actually taken - the route that the light ray takes is always the fastest possible one. That's Fermat's principle of least time."

Eddie had all but forgotten why Richie was telling the story. "So this is what Maturin responded to?"

"Bingo. Well, it responded to the animated presentation of it, not the exact beautiful yarn I just span for you, but yes." Richie's grin was manic with delight as he held his hand out for a high five. "Now is that fergalicious or what?"

Eddie couldn't resist clapping their hands together. "That is pretty fucking fergalicious dude." He stamped away the fire Richie's smile was setting in his chest with a practised decisiveness. "But how come I haven't heard of Fermat's principle before?" He picked up a binder and chucked it at his head but Richie sidestepped it easily; it was a primer on the physics topics Richie had anticipated discussing with Maturin and light enough to throw properly, it was not. "You went on forever about Planck masses and the spin-flip of atomic hydrogen, and not a word about the refraction of light."

"I was totally guessing what would be useful to know," Richie said without embarrassment, "I was basically writing about my favourite bits. But it's fucking weird that ol' Fermys is the first breakthrough - even though it's easy to explain in terms of Ben's Grindr sluttery, you need calculus to describe it mathematically. And not, like, ordinary calculus, you need the calculus of variations. My money was on simple circle theorems for the breakthrough, given that Maturin likes drawing so many, y'know, circles."

Eddie read between the lines. "You think Maturin's idea of what's simple doesn't match ours?"

"That's exactly what I fucking think." Richie bounced on his toes and jerked his chin like he was spoiling for a fight. "What are you doing for dinner?"

Eddie blinked at the sudden pivot. "Oh, I, uh, I dunno."

Richie clapped his hands together then spread them wide. "Let's go fuckin celebrate, spaghetti man! C'mon, food's on me."

"Don't call me that," Eddie said automatically then didn't give himself time to deliberate. "And this is your breakthrough so don't be stupid, food's on me."

There are times when you take care of me too, though. Like when my arm is broken and I'm nearly crying because Henry Bowers poured a juice box into the cast while his friends held me down behind the bleachers, and I'm sure it's gonna go mouldy, and they'll have to amputate my arm, and my mom is gonna kill me if I go home. You put an arm around my shoulder and steer me away from the others - the others? - because you know I don't want people to see me cry.

"C'mon Eds, it'll be okay," you say, "we'll go to mine and use my mom's hairdryer and she'll never even know. I can play you that Eddie Murphy album I was telling you about, his opening bit is all-"

"I really don't need one of your fucking voices right now," I snap and my own voice is nothing like it should be, all high and wheezy. I wish I had the control over it that you do.

"Bullshit, man, you love my voices," you say, but you abandon what you'd been saying. What I had meant was, I don't want to be distracted, and you understood that. "Do you want me to get your aspirator?"

I nod because it's easier than speaking. You already know which pocket it's in and it'll be faster than me taking off my backpack or reaching round. You hand it to me. One pump, hold it, exhale, another, hold it, exhale, give it back. I don't say thank you because you already know. I look down at my cast and the white plaster is now brownish-yellow; I'm so worried the red ink is gonna dissolve right away, leaving nothing but the stark LOSER underneath.

You're also looking at it. "That was a seriously punk move, y'know," you say and you trace a finger over the red V. "I wish you'd let me sign it though."

"There is a zero percent chance you wouldn't draw a dick on it," I say.

"Well, you know what they say, leave no penis undrawn."

When you make me laugh, I feel like a fountain. "Who says that?"

"It's one of the great universal truths of the world, Edward plasterhands, but I think Socrates said it first." You pronounce it soh-craits, like Bill and Ted. "It sounds better in the original Latin, velay onay enispay 'ndrawnuay."

"Socrates was definitely Greek." I pronounce it like Socrates and I'm right.

"People can speak more than one language you know," you say snootily, "you shouldn't be so close-minded."

"I'm bilingual, asshole!"

"Not sure what you playing for both teams has to do with this, but your mother and I love you no matter who you're dating," you say, "just be home by 10 and if you hear the bed frame a-rockin' upstairs, turn around and go out again."

"That's disgusting," I say and I whack you with my cast. It hits rather harder than I intended and I feel a jolt of pain run up from my wrist to my shoulder and out my mouth in a sharp hiss.

"Careful, fuck! What are you trying to do, break it all over again?" You're wincing as your hand covers the place I hit you and you pass me my aspirator again. I roll it between my hands but I don't use it; I'm trying to cut down.

"Sorry," I say, feeling small and mean and ashamed.

"Eh, no worries," you shrug it off quickly. "It's all fucks and chucks between friends, now c'mon, let's go wipe off your cast before it gets properly stained."

"There's washing up liquid in the supply cupboard that might help," I say.

"Sounds good."

So we walk back towards school together and I hope your head doesn't hurt too badly. I sneak a sideways glance at you in the late afternoon sun but the light is angled low this late in the autumn and your hair is casting shadows I can't see around.

"Speaking of bisexuality," you say, "I- will you teach me Polish one day?"

I think about it for a second. "If you promise to never speak it in front of my mom."

You hold your pinky out to seal the promise. "I only want to speak it with you anyway."

Eddie spent a morning in his room at the Town House pouring over the new binder Richie had issued entitled FERMATGATE in imposing Times New Roman Bold. It had been given to him with a warning post-it note on the cover:

_Eds-_

_Maturin's whole concept of math is probably exactly the opposite of ours so strap in for the long game. This explains basically the same stuff as before but reworked to the tune of variational principles. It's easier than it sounds - you'll get the hang of it in no time._

His handwriting was even messier than usual, his excitement seeping into the ink and causing it to run.

_We got big things ahead baby. Send a weirdly zealous police officer after me and call me the mayor of Paris because things are looking a lot Less Miserable!!!_

_R x_

Eddie smiled at the scruffy sign off; he folded the note in half and tucked it into his wallet before continuing.

The binder was well written and much less circuitous than a verbal explanation from Richie would have been, but Eddie still wasn't sure he understood everything. The gist of it was that a 'variational principle' was any physical principle wherein a given variable was maximised or minimised; as Richie had explained before, Fermat's principle used time as that variable. But the binder elaborated that it was more accurate to call Fermat's principle variational as opposed to minimizing because there were certain cases in which light took the longest possible path, that it was maximising. The few examples that followed that revelation made Eddie's head spin, but he got the point - a variational principle is one that relies on a variable pushed to an extreme. The binder then talked further about mechanics, thermodynamics, electromagnetics, all the topics they'd covered before, and restated them as variational principles. That was a bit too far for Eddie. Give him a nursery rhyme in Czech and he'd do his best but he thought he could stare at those numbers for a hundred years and never really understand what they meant.

One element of the last page did intrigue him though; it was a hand drawn diagram to illustrate the principal of least action in regards to quantum mechanics, and it was a tangle of vectors and arrows that seemed to Eddie more wind forecast than scientific tool. The interesting thing was that because it was photocopied out of Richie's own notepad, a cheap orange thing with the world's shittiest paper, the notes on the reverse of the page showed faintly through. It was a log of a session with Maturin that had gone relatively well - not in itself unusual - and underneath it, backwards like letters in a mirror, was written _świetnie!!!_.

"Why didn't you say you knew Polish?" Eddie asked under his breath, and resolved to confront Richie about it as soon as he saw him; if you use 'great' in Polish in your own notes, there's no way you don't know my surname is Polish.

As Eddie made his way to the Barrens and what had eventually been christened The Clubhouse, he found himself thinking more about variational principles and the math of extremes. He still couldn't really grasp the significance of physical attributes like 'action'; he couldn't, with any confidence, ponder the significance of treating such an attribute as fundamental. But he chewed it over in his mind until he'd reworked the concept into more familiar terms: what kind of worldview did Maturin have, that it would consider Fermat's principle the simplest explanation of light refraction? What kind of perception made a minimum or maximum so readily apparent?

After the session later that day, Ben caught up to Eddie as they waited for their turns in the decontamination booth, which was really no more than a scrapped stall shower that Stan had rigged some modified air humidifiers to. "Hey Eddie, I was just thinking, have we tried watching Maturin write in slow motion?"

Eddie's brow furrowed. "Not that I'm aware of, why?"

"Well, while you were having your back and forth about heat earlier, you know when it was being all hesitant?"

Heat had been a particularly tricky concept to crack, but since Richie's Fermatgate, Maturin had been really chatty on the whole subject. "Yeah?"

"Yeah, so, I think maybe because it wasn't sure, it was writing a little bit slower and I think the whole sentence or paragraph or whatever doesn't appear simultaneously like we thought, I think it's just usually too fast for our eyes to see." Ben shifted from one foot to the other, almost nervous. Despite his use of 'we', this was the first time he'd gotten involved in the linguistics side of things. "Should I get Bev to slow down the footage for us?"

"If she can, sounds great, thanks," Eddie said. He'd been making a conscious effort to be nicer recently, to acknowledge people's contributions. "Good spot, man."

When Ben grinned, he was really quite ridiculously attractive and Eddie felt a phantom tightness in his chest respond. "Thanks, bud."

"The framerate of our camera sucks ass," Bev said, after half an hour of uploading and rendering. "At least Bill never changed it from 25fps after bringing it back from the UK, that gives us, like, 4% more to work with. Next time, lemme know in advance and I can try and upgrade our options, but here you go anyway, this is the best I can do for now." She tapped the space-bar and the video played as a series of stills that cycled through, each lingering for a moment. It was a sentence from earlier, one from the heat discussion Ben had been talking about, judging by the timestamp. Slowed to this extreme, they watched as a long arc of black twisted through the air, elegant and sinuous, coming to end on a small flick before another line weaved around it, then another and another until a cluster of semagrams filled the screen.

"Holy shit," Eddie said. Ben and Bev looked at him. "Holy shit, Ben, what the fuck! Bev, play it again."

She did, this time setting it up as a repeating loop, and the three of them watched as the lines danced their way across the screen like Busby Berkeley wettest dream, spinning and cooperating to produce semagrams in their interaction.

Eddie punched Ben's shoulder. "Fucking hell, this changes everything! Dude!" Eddie bounced on his toes, his whole body alive with frenetic energy, like he was a robot whose batteries had just been replaced.

"It does?" Ben asked.

"Are you kidding? Look, pause it a second, Bev, gimme that pad." Eddie grabbed a pen and drew his own version of the sentence that was floating on Bev's laptop screen, labelling each graph _A_ to _E_. "Look at what it's writing. This means, uh, 'Eddie doesn't understand what cold means', right?"

They nodded, probably just to humour him; he knew no one was really keeping up with the Maturin B practise regime he'd given them all.

"Right, so it's these 5 semagrams to it, yeah, but it's not drawing them as separate graphs that it prints one at a time, or all of them all at once like we thought! You see, it starts here -" he stole from Bev's pencil case and highlighted each element he mentioned in order - "in semagram A, which means, uh, to not easily know, and it starts with this determinant that distinguishes it as 'understand' as opposed to any other verb, then it slides down to C to become the morpheme to denote not-hot as an antonym, and on to D where it becomes the backbone for my name. Of course my Maturin B looks like shit, I'm basically drawing stars without construction lines!"

"Now you've lost me," Bev said.

"I think I got it," Ben said slowly, "can I borrow your pen?" Eddie handed it over and Ben drew a little five point star in the corner of the paper, haltingly and slowly, point by point to produce an awkward looking thing:

Then, he drew another star, this one taking considerably less time in his steady engineer's hand, drawing it the way kids get taught to in kindergarten:

He twisted the paper to show Bev and stood back. She looked at it for a long moment.

"The second one looks more even," she said, "are you just excited about having better handwriting?"

"It's not just that," Eddie said and looked at Ben to say, go ahead.

"With that first one, you could add in an extra point or invert one branch or whatever you want while you're drawing it, it's adaptable," Ben explained, "but with the second method, you're always going to get a five point star, like you know what the whole thing will be before you start the first line. If you change even one line, it doesn't work anymore."

She mulled that over. "So you're saying Maturin can only write something when it knows the whole thing it's going to say beforehand? I went on a calligraphy course once, they said that planning is the key to good penmanship."

"Yeah, and then I bet you spent an hour with a ruler and mechanical pencil just to write your name one time right?" Eddie said. "No one could ever hold a conversation like that, or technically..."

He saw it in her eyes when she finally understood what he was getting at. "No human could," she said. "Maturin does not experience time as slowly as we do."

"No," Eddie said, "I don't think it does."

My favourite joke I ever heard is from that half an hour set Tig Notaro did just after she got diagnosed with cancer. The whole show's fucking incredible. The bit I'm talking about is a couple minutes in when she's so far been just explaining that she's been diagnosed, she broke up with her girlfriend, and her mom just died, and it's getting some laughs. Then she talks about how her friend says to her, oh, you must have seen those funny cancer cards!

So she's like, no, I only just got diagnosed, why the fuck would I have seen those funny cancer cards?

And her friend shows her one of the cards and it says, so you have cancer. Sad face. Then inside the card, it says, thank goodness. I've been looking for a reason to shave my head.

When she says that, you can tell in the recording, the audience doesn't know whether to laugh or not and you end up with this awkward halfway house of lukewarm reception. And Tig says, I can't believe that's what you guys haven't laughed at tonight. That was straight from the funny cancer greeting cards.

It's not the funniest joke ever, it's not the one that made me laugh the most - you win both those prizes by a long way - but it's definitely my favourite.

Friday night found Richie and Eddie at the Great American  
Diner on the edge of Derry, the name of which Eddie always read sarcastically; it was a bit crappy and the neon sign outside had lost a couple letters so now it just said 'EAT AM ICAN DI E' but they'd starting frequenting it as a place to get away from the Barrens and the Town House when either one of them needed a break. They sat sharing a side of fries as they waited for their burgers to arrive.

Eddie watched as Richie dipped one in ketchup and waited until he was taking a bite before asking innocently, "so how's your Maturin B practice going?"

Richie froze for a second before swallowing too quick. "Good, great, excellent!" His eyes were watering and he was pretending not to have burnt his throat. "Molto penne, mi corazon."

"You've given up haven't you?" Eddie had given up trying not to smile at Richie's act about a week ago.

"Oh, absolutely," Richie nodded vigorously, slipping into an inexplicable British accent. "I'm a right tosser at languages, love, sorry."

"Yeah, I can tell from the way you just conglomerated I think three romance languages into four words."

"'S'all just La'in in the end, ennit, guvnuh? 'Sides, you gave up on the ol' maffs too, wot."

Damn, I thought you hadn't noticed. "About that..." Eddie trailed off, giving his best imitation of Bev's most winning smile.

Richie shrugged and shoved a couple more fries in his mouth. "No skin off my block, me old pal, I'm just-" he winced and dropped the accent. "Oof, that went too Australian even for me."

"Oh, I dunno," Eddie breezed, "it might be better than your usual drawl."

Richie smiled good-naturedly at the ribbing, then his foot tapped against Eddie's shin under the table. "How are you finding the language though? Similar to anything you've studied before?"

"Oh, not even a little bit," Eddie widened his eyes for emphasis. "It's cool as shit though, and I'm getting better at it."

"Are you dreaming in its language?" Richie asked.

Eddie was taken aback by the question. He hadn't thought about it. "Yeah, I guess I am," he said, trying to remember anything of the vague images he always had after waking. "That's not so unusual though, I did an immersion program in Brazil and I still sometimes dream in Portuguese if the summer gets hot."

But even then, Eddie realised, he had always been thinking phonologically, using his inner voice. These days, he sometimes found himself thinking in semagrams. He was reminded suddenly of his colleague back at Columbia who'd grown up using American Sign Language with deaf parents, how she'd told him she usually thought in ASL; he remembered he'd found that hard to imagine, using inner hands rather than an inner voice. Now he found himself thinking in the semagrams that bloomed in his minds eye.

He was suddenly exhausted, really feeling the extent of the ache that had been building behind his temples all day, and he reached up to rub them.

"Hey, Eds, you okay?" Richie makes a weirdly aborted movement, hands up to the table then back onto the seat.

"Yeah, fine, just," Eddie put his own hands back on the table. "17 hour days, right?"

"Yeah, fuck Maturin's cycle, and the planet it grew up on." Richie was trying to cheer him up.

"I just get these headaches," Eddie couldn't help saying it out loud now someone had asked. "And I'm sick of the fucking Town House, I want a real house, apartment, whatever. Don't get me wrong, I love what we're doing, I just..."

"Miss home."

Something like that. "Yeah."

Richie finally reaches across the table and takes Eddie's hands; Richie's are bigger than his own, warm from being trapped under his thighs, a habit Richie falls into when he doesn't want to fidget. It's comfortable and soothing, going a long way to clearing his headache; he'd never admit to it, but it was better than he'd thought it would be. He feels his loneliness deep in his bones. "We'll get through this," Richie said, voice low, "it's alright." The moment stretches.

Eddie pulls his hands back as the waitress arrives with their food and places it on the table, uniquely oblivious to the tension in that way only underpaid service staff can be. He tries not to look too relieved when she leaves and Richie, instead of trying to meet his eye, digs right in.

"Fuck a duck," Richie groaned through his first mouthful, "there is nothing that tastes better than impending heart failure."

Eddie laughed and Richie joined in, eyes warm, and when their laughter subsided, they sat in silence for a few minutes, enjoying their burgers and each others company. Eddie's mind drifted as he watched the neon lights dance on the rims of Richie's glasses.

"I do have a question though," Eddie said eventually. "It's about Fermat's principle, or I guess all variational principles, I-"

"No, don't tell me, I can read your mind," Richie interrupted, then closed his eyes and screwed up his face like a bad actor in a sci-fi movie, salted fingertips pressed to his temple. "You think it's weird that Fermat describes light in a way that implies it has a set goal and a decision making process to meet that goal, rather than simple cause-and-effect physics like you're used to from high school." He opened his eyes again, a cheeky eyebrow daring Eddie to tell him he's wrong.

"Hole in one," Eddie said, "the way he describes it is, like, purposive."

Richie adopted an imperious tone. "Thou shalt minimize or maximize the time taken to reach your destination; yea, and so it shall be. It shall be so!" He slapped his hand against the table like it was the gavel of a judge. "Yeah, that's, like, one of the age old physics debates from the 16-whatevers; Planck wrote a fuck tonne about it. Almost the entirety of physics forever has been causal, then here comes this guy with a principle that's basically teleological, and I once won bananagrams in 10 seconds flat by combining 'teleological' with 'fuckeningly'. Luckiest day of my life, probably."

Eddie made a mental note to cycle back round to that last bit later. "Okay, so, like," Eddie grabbed the pen from Richie's shirt pocket and, on his paper napkin, drew a copy of the diagram that Richie had drawn on his blackboard before. "Right," he thought aloud, "so let's say the light wants to take the fastest path. How does it go about doing that?"

"Like I said before, it checks all its apps for directions and picks the one that gets there fastest." He picked up the last two fries and offered one to Eddie.

Eddie took it and bit off half, swallowing before continuing. "So to do that, the ray of light has to know exactly where its destination is, 'cause if it was somewhere else, the fastest path would be different."

Richie considered that and nodded. "I guess the idea of a 'fastest path' is meaningless unless there's a specific destination. And computing the length of a path also requires information about what lies along that path, like where the water's surface is."

Eddie kept staring at the diagram on the napkin. "And the light has to know all of that ahead of time, before it starts moving, right?"

"Yeah, so far as we're stretching this anthropomorphism it does," Richie said. "The light can't just pick a direction and go, then make course corrections later, because then it wouldn't be taking the fastest possible path. The light has to do all its computations at the very beginning."

Eddie thought to himself, the ray of light has to know where it will ultimately end up before it can choose the direction to begin moving in. I know what that reminds me of. I look up at you. "That's what was bugging me."

"Hey Richie, your ten minutes are up."

"What are you talking about?"

"The hammock, ten minutes each was the rule!"

You shrug with practiced nonchalance. "I don't see any sign."

"Are you being this way right now? Really?" My insides feel like bees swarming faster and faster. "No, no, no, no, why would there be a sign if it was a verbal agreement!"

"I don't think-"

"I remember you agreeing on the fucking rule!" Well, if you won't move, I'm climbing in anyway.

"-ouch, shit! I don't think-"

"-have to move, no, fuck you Richie-"

"-fucking stop, I can see your vagina-"

"-and I don't even have a vagina so shut the fuck up-"

"-what are you grinding on me for I-"

"-ten minutes each-"

"-already fucked your mom!" And for that, I give you the biggest kick I can manage.

When our weight settles though, we're both in the hammock and you even managed to keep hold of your comic. Your ankle is heavy on my stomach. I can feel that the others - oh my God, bevbillstanmikeben - the others gave up on watching us a while ago.

Behind me, Bev - bruisedarmscigarettesredhair - Bev says, "you're awfully good at this, new kid."

I can tell from here that Ben's - roundcheeksbaggysweatshirtskind eyes, oh God Ben - Ben's blushing, I can practically feel the heat radiating off him. "You really think so? There's actually a summer program in Bar Harbor, it teaches you, like, everything about architecture, I was thinking about applying."

"I'll do it!" You butt in, "I'll do anything to get the hell out of Derry."

I frown at that and, since it's right there, stick my toe up your nose, but you batt it away easily. I used to do gross shit like that all the time, didn't I?

"Man, when I graduate, I'm going to Florida," Mike says, voice warm and full of hope, but low like he's afraid to say it out loud. He was so young and friendly, new to our group that summer because he didn't go to our school. You watch him speak, comic sagging forgotten in your hands.

"What's in Florida, Mike?" Trust Ben to facilitate a soft moment.

Mike's reply is hesitant. "I dunno, I guess it's just a place I always wanted to go."

"Stan, you should go with Mike to Florida, you already act 80," you say, voice brash and loud as ever as you wink lewdly. "You'd clean up with all the grandmas." It gets the laugh you were clearly aiming for. I laugh.

Stan, neat, tense, inexplicable Stan doesn't. "Do... Do you guys think we'll still be friends? When we're older?"

That changes the mood of the room. I watch as something clouds your eyes, which had been bright with the pride of landing a joke.

"W-why wouldn't we be?" Scoffs Bill. Bill, who was our leader back than, who could cycle so fast, who I would have died for.

"Do any of your parents still hang out with their friends from middle school?" Stan says and something sours in my belly; I can't look away from you because then I know this moment will end. I knock your glasses off with my foot so that you look at me too.

"Things might be different, we all might be different." Bill speaks like a grown-up since Georgie had died. "But we'll ss-still be together. I don't think that just g-g... Goes away because we got older." There's something in my gut to tell me he's wrong though, and I think it's in yours too.

"Yeah Stan, c'mon," Bev says quietly, "you don't have to be so

sad all the time when he was young," Richie said, pulling a jar of honey off the shelves and chucking it into the basket Eddie was holding. "He just has that vibe, y'know?"

Eddie agreed, though he was unable to articulate how he knew. "He is weirdly morbid for a doctor, not a great bedside manner."

"I kinda enjoy it," Richie said, "last time he was taking my blood, he told me he could see the platelets in my blood without needing a microscope then he laughed for, like, ten minutes and I have no idea why."

A bottle of sriracha mayonnaise bounced off Eddie's chest and into the basket. "Fucking watch it, Richie! Careful!" He reached down and arranged the contents of the basket a bit more evenly. "What are you even making with all this?"

"Student stir fry," Richie said, leading the way to the next aisle. "Honey, sriracha mayo, soy sauce. Sweet, spicy, salty, cheap, tasty. I ate it 5 days a week during my undergrad."

"There's no way the electric hobs in our rooms go hot enough to make this," Eddie said, raising an eyebrow and fearing the response he was sure he was about to get.

"Not on their own they don't," Richie grinned. "Ben's engineering skills may have been bribed with a bottle of Walmart's finest rosé."

Bingo. Smirking to himself, Eddie decided to ignore that potential health and safety violation in favor of the promised meal. He watched the shelves as they walked past, vaguely derided the boring t shirts and ugly jumpers on offer, when his eyes fell on a shirt. Beige-yellow, short sleeves, little black crosses. He saw it in his mind's eye hung off Richie's broad shoulders and thought, you hold that to my stomach and you look horrified, so scared. Your glasses are broken.

"Hey, Rich," Eddie said, and his voice was calm and even. "You know you were saying you needed new clothes?"

"Hmm?" Richie popped his head back from around the next corner. "What did you have in mind?"

They finish at the supermarket not long after that and walk back to the Town House in the clear night. A part of Eddie is listening to what Richie's saying, it must be because he knows he's responding somehow, but most of him is tied up in the coldness locked into his spine. His heart's still racing.

He'd been having more and more moments like that in the last few weeks, he knew it. He keeps having this recurring dream where he's floating, though the feeling varies - sometimes like falling in slow motion, sometimes like being under anaesthetic - and he finds himself thinking, I am where I am meant to be; I wouldn't want to be anywhere else; this is not so bad. Overall, it translates to a calm self-acceptance he's never felt anywhere else.

The waking memories though, they're harder to accept. At first he'd dismissed them as byproducts of the exhaustion as he'd adjusted to Maturin's immutable timetable but now he wasn't so sure. He saw the others, Bev and Mike and all of them, from long before this year; he saw Richie, as a child and as a teenager and as an adult. He saw Richie a lot. Sometimes Richie was in the dreams too, as he is now but with broken glasses or as a preteen in his underwear, holding Eddie's hand as they leap, screaming, "cowabunga Eds!" And Eddie turns to him and says, "don't call me Eds, you know I-" and he jolted awake.

"You okay?"

Eddie gasped, sitting up in bed, hand scrabbling over his solar plexus and certain there was going to be... But his hands came away clean, no blood. For the first time in twenty years, he wished for his aspirator.

"Hey," Richie said softly, and a hand came to sooth him, stroking circles against his bare back. "You're okay, I'm here Eds, don't worry."

This is unbearable. Eddie twists away and jumps out of bed, gathering his clothes on the way to the door. "Yeah, no, I'm fine, just not used to, y'know- I think I'm just gonna go back to my room, don't mind me, go back to sleep."

"Oh, okay," your voice is confused, trying not to sound hurt. "Next time we can stay in your room, if that-"

"I don't think there's a next time, Richie," I say and I don't look at you as I leave.

_Quantum mechanics does not describe what happens to a physical system, but only how a physical system affects another physical system. Does it mean, as it seems to me, that we must accept the idea that reality is only an interaction?_

"So what do you think?"

I look up from the proof copy of your speech and you're shifting from foot to foot, too keyed up to sit. I look back down. _Reality is only an interaction_.

"I think there's not as much swearing or gay jokes as I was expecting," I say. "Rich, I think it's perfect, Ted isn't gonna know what hit him."

You huff out a noise like a train letting off steam and flop down, half on the sofa and half on me. "Thank fuck, I was gonna eat my own glasses if I had to stare at that fucking computer screen any longer."

"Aww, poor little genius," I tease, shifting to settle your head on my thigh better and brushing the hair off your forehead with my fingertips. "So hard to be given international renown and recognition."

"Yes, yeah, comfort me baby," you squirm in my lap. "It's really hard."

I want to make fun of how easy you think I must be for that line to work on me, but the line does, unfortunately, work on me. No way I'm letting you know that, though. I lean down and kiss your forehead gently. "Convince me you've earned it." I take off your glasses and kiss your eyelids. "What do you deserve?" I kiss the corner of your mouth, deliberately not your lips. This is my favorite part of the game.

Our faces are close enough that I feel your exhale and know that it is already getting shaky. You nudge your nose up, brushing over my cheek and you cup my neck to bring me down further so you can kiss the scar there. When I sit up a little, back starting to ache from bending over so tightly, you follow me and speak into my open mouth. "I think I deserve a kiss from my boyfriend."

"Oh yeah?" I am dizzy with all the butterflies suddenly swarming in my stomach when you twist around, pulling me close as you lean back against the arm of the sofa. I don't let our faces get any further apart. "Why did you do to deserve it?" It's a dare, a challenge; I know how much you hate actually admitting to your own triumphs.

You know this too, but no one has ever had you wrapped around their little finger the way I do. The sun is warm against my back, streaming through the French doors which are open onto our little patch of grass, and you are looking up at me with your own burning heat. One of my hands is on your shoulder and the other is just barely grazing your leg. When you speak, it is hardly voiced. "I wrote a speech."

"And?" I straddle your lap, settling just high enough that you can feel my dick pressing against your stomach. I'm already hard, you've turned me back into a fucking teenager, I swear, but that's okay because you jerk your hips up involuntarily and I can feel the length of you stiffening against my ass too. We want each other so badly sometimes it hurts.

"And it's good," you say after a moment, clutching at my waist, trying not to get ahead of yourself, hands huge and hot under my top. Your pinkies dip under the waistband of my boxers and you can still reach halfway up my ribcage with your thumbs. You're shaking minutely with shame and lust and pride all at once.

I grind down slightly, comforting and encouraging you. I promise this is almost over, I'll kiss you soon. You gasp then cut the noise off, trying to pull me closer. I wish you could. There is fire in my bloodstream and it is rocking my hips into little circles, building friction so delicious I could lick it off you, and you once told me heat is the only thing that makes the future different from the past. I gulp at the air and force my eyes open again, force my hips to a stop, because I haven't heard what I set out to hear yet. "And where are you giving this speech?"

"Vancouver, B.C." You're talking fast now, no hesitation, veins bulging in your forearms with the strain of keeping still, but you have to pause to suck in air, the billows of your lungs held tight over your diaphragm. "TED annual conference." You pull another breath. I can't believe I can do this to you. "It's a fucking honor."

"You're damn right it-" I cut myself off because I can't fucking take it, I have to kiss you right the fuck now.

I can't help myself, Richie, I want this to happen so badly.

"For the record," Eddie said, making sure to maintain eye contact, "I still think this is a terrible idea and there are a million opportunities for miscommunication."

"Noted," Mike said, looking hopeful.

"Good. Then, having said that..." Eddie sighed. "I think we can give asking The Question a go."

There was a cheer from Bev and Bill, Ben clapped Mike on the shoulder, even Stan grinned. Eddie didn't look at Richie's response.

"You really think we're ready?" Mike asked. "Don't answer that. Holy cow, I'm so proud of you!" He surged forward to pull Eddie into a hug.

"It wasn't just me, it was a team effort," Eddie said when he was released, feeling distinctly crumpled but unable to hold down a smile. Mike was a good hugger.

"And we're a fucking good team," Bev grinned. She had one arm round Bill's waist and one round Ben's neck, which, given the height difference, was pretty impressive.

"We can't get ahead of ourselves, remember, we might not be able to understand the reply," Eddie cautioned.

"We can work it out," Stan said, "we're pretty fuckin' clever."

The lack of Richie's mile-a-minute chatter was starting to become obvious to even the members of their group who didn't feel like a moon orbiting his sun, Eddie rather thought. "I'll go... Get ready then," he said, and left to pretend to look for his notepad.

Two hours later, they were in a session. It was all hands on deck, the full complement of Eddie, Richie, Mike, and Ben. They'd never been in a session all at once and that, combined with the remote audience in the tents and Maturin on its screen and the general gravitas of the moment, was giving Eddie cold feet.

"Whenever you're ready," Mike said, pressing record.

"Yep," Eddie said, voice weak. Why had he said they'd ask today again? Because I know what I'm doing and we're as ready as we'll ever be, he reminded himself. His legs were still shaking though.

"Eddie?" Mike asked. The three of them were looking back at him where he was cowering against the wall.

He opened his mouth and no sound came out.

Ben and Mike automatically turned to Richie.

Richie hesitated for a long moment then walked over to Eddie with a pained expression like he was pulling nails and trying to be detached about it. He stopped four feet away, probably the furthest distance they'd ever spoken from. "Hey, man, c'mon, what's the matter?"

Eddie shook his head, looking resolutely at the floor and the shadows from Maturin's screen reflected there.

"Eddie, you're ready for this," he tried again, "we're ready for this, you said it yourself."

"Maybe you should, uh, maybe you guys should ask," Eddie said.

"Why the fuck would we ask?" Richie came a half step closer. "You're the one who knows its language."

"I really don't, I- I," Eddie's hands fluttered uselessly around his face, he knew he was panicking, "Richie I really don't, it's not that simple-"

"Hey, hey, stop that, hey-" Richie grabbed his arms to still them and now they were chest to chest. "Who jumped into a gross sewer to meet an alien?"

Eddie looked up at him, there was nowhere else to look. Richie's eyebrows were raised sternly. "Me," he said miserably.

"Who then actually made friends with said alien?"

"Me."

"Who put up with my shit long enough to get us here?"

Eddie opened his mouth to protest, you're not something I have to put up with, but Richie glared at him until he gave in. "Me."

"Yeah," Richie's grip on his wrists softened. "You're braver than you think."

Eddie felt manipulated, he felt cheap and he was pissed about it, but his racing heart was calmed. "Okay, I- yeah, okay." He lowered his arms. "Thanks, Richie."

"You're welcome," Richie said, and almost cupped his cheek but Eddie flinched. The spark in Richie's eyes dulled. "Sorry." He turned and went back to stand with Ben.

Come back, Eddie wanted to say, kiss me again. He didn't.

"Okay, fucking just... jump in the deep end, yeah, let's go," Eddie muttered to himself and he set up the easel to hold the A3 pad and flipped to the page he'd written earlier, accurately predicting he'd be too shaky to do it now. 4 interconnected semagrams, _goal-process Maturin this-planet query_ , deceptively simple. What is your purpose on Earth?

It was as though Maturin had been waiting for the question, its reply up almost before Eddie had finished turning the page. Two semagrams, large and bold. Instead of fading as they usually did, they hovered there like warning signs, hard and imposing, sustained by a constant stream from Maturin's ink secreters.

"What does it mean?" Mike asked after a long moment.

"I don't know, I..." Eddie recognised one of the graphs, it was the verb 'to arrive' with a modifier to indicate speed or growth. The other was new. "This is what I was afraid of, I don't recognize the left bit. I think... I think it's saying something's coming."

That was bad phrasing, and there air in the room turned immediately sharp, like they'd all sucked in a breath at once and were unwilling to let it go. Quickly, Eddie turned the page and scribbled a rough semagram, _clarification-need_. "What do you mean?" He asked aloud as he finished, a habit he'd fallen into more for the benefit of his fellow humans than for Maturin.

This time, there were too many semagrams to count, covering the screen, and they were fading faster than Eddie could read them. As though through water, he heard Richie swearing and Ben gasp somewhere far off, but he ignored it, trying to glean what he could; a few semagrams kept appearing over and over again. One was his own name, _Eddie_ , also _Mike_ and _place-here_ , but by far the most often was that new semagram he hadn't recognised. "Slow down for me, Maturin, we can't get this all at once."

The newest semagrams faded and none came to replace them for a long moment. Then, _understand-not Eddie Maturin B_. "Eddie doesn't understand," he translated. It wasn't a question. They faded and were replaced again. Eddie swallowed.

"Touch screen," he announced. There was no modifier to indicate a request; this was an order.

"Touch screen?" Ben repeated.

Eddie studied the semagrams again as they faded but he was sure. He nodded. "Touch screen."

The room went still as they all stared at the screen, something they'd all decided it was best to stay at least 6 feet away from. No readings could be taken of it on any device so, as far as the equipment was concerned, it didn't exist and Stan had taken that to mean an unknown magnitude of risk, ergo they'd steered clear.

"Well, here goes nothing." Richie took two steps and was at the screen before anyone could stop him. "Yippee-ki-yay, motherf-"

His fingertips touched the screen and three things happened in quick succession

The room tilted, or at least that's what it felt like, flipping 90 degrees up so the back wall was now the floor, sending Mike and Ben and Eddie flying down into the tunnel. Almost at the same moment, Richie rose, unaffected by what the others were experiencing, as though lifted by his shoulders into the air, limbs swinging like a ragdoll and head lolling onto his shoulder. His eyes were milky white, exactly Maturin's screen in miniature. The third thing to happen was, as Eddie fell through the doorway, trying desperately to grab onto something, anything, a piece of equipment hurtled past him and sliced into his cheek, and a pain like nothing he'd ever felt ripped through his mouth, down his tongue, throughout his whole body. In the seconds before he blacked out, he thought he saw Richie float forward, inward, upward, until the screen absorbed him.

Those born into the English language are born into one concept of time; metaphorically, we stand with the future ahead of us and we say, we're almost at the end of the semester, as we struggle towards it. Sometimes we say, Christmas has come up fast, and we imagine time as a river rushing past us, too fast to properly take stock of because we haven't yet done our present shopping. Occasionally, we draw a timeline, left to right, across the pages of a school book. This is time for those of us who think in English.

But this visualisation of time isn't universal. In Aymaran, the future is behind us and the past ahead, which makes logical sense - we can see our history, we don't know what's in the future. Or otherwise, Mandarin speakers put the past above us and the future below, which is speculated to arise from the historically top-to-bottom writing system.

I am, all things considered, as professionally successful as it is possible to be in the underfunded and unprofitable field of linguistics; when students come up to me after a lecture on linguistic relativity and ask if the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is as cool as it sounds, I always serve my answer with a pinch of salt: yes, it is full of potential and it's a good one to whip out and impress your family at Thanksgiving, but it is ultimately best interpreted to mean that we think in the grammar of the language we know, and it is only proved at the simplest levels. Learning another language, I tell them, couldn't give you superpowers or change who you are. Besides, to override the worldview you grew up on, you would have to be immersed in the new language, at the exclusion of all others, for probably four times as long as you have already been speaking your mother tongue.

In the grand scheme of my life, I have spent less than 0.008% of my time learning Maturin's language, but recovering a language you once knew is always much faster than learning from scratch.

"Do you dream in their language?" You ask me. I dream about you. You are not ahead of me, not behind me. You are both; you are inside me; you are all around.

Eddie came to in the medical tent, uncoordinated and dazed in the dentist chair. He flinched against the bright lights and the sudden sound, which took a moment to resolve itself into voices.

"-can't just fucking leave him there," Bev was saying, muffled from the next tent over.

The flinch had caused an ache to roar into existence in Eddie's cheek and he reached up with tentative, horrified fingers, to find it bandaged in gauze.

"We don't even know where there is!" Stan snapped, his usually deadpan voice tight with anxiety. "For all we know, he's fucking dead, Bev."

Eddie's whole face was on fire, his tongue immobile and heavy like a dead thing in his mouth.

"Alright, hey, no, he's not dead," Mike interjected quickly.

"Maturin's never been aggressive before, he won't be dead," Bill agreed, "I just think we have to call someone Mike, we can't-"

"Call who?" Mike said, and Eddie could picture his frustration. "Who do you propose we call, Bill?"

"I don't know, the police or the a-army or... Just someone, Richie's been fucking t-taken, we have to call s-someone!"

"No, we have to go get him," Bev was getting louder.

"Hey, hey, everyone, let's just calm down," Ben started playing peacemaker, "Eddie's still knocked out in the other room, he needs to rest."

Eddie froze from where he'd been untangling himself from heart monitors and pressure cuffs.

"I've never seen someone go through shock like that," Stan said, low and horrible. There was the sound of footsteps getting closer

Eddie pulled the nose cannula off, the last bit of equipment, as quickly and quietly as he could, and left through the decontamination tent before Stan could come stop him.

It was only once he got to the clearing where Maturin's spaceship floated that Eddie realised he didn't really have much of a plan. He was working off of two certainties he found deep in his gut: 1) Richie was in that ship, and 2) Maturin wasn't gonna give him back of its own accord, not until it had made Eddie understand whatever it wanted him to see before.

He had wondered about going to touch the screen himself, but in the seconds between seeing it absorb Richie and himself passing out, Eddie could have sworn it had gone dark, so he was pretty sure that was a no-go. He could try and climb a tree and then jump onto the ship and... Slide off because there was no chance of a handgrip up there. He felt tears smarting the corners of his eyes and tried not to stamp like a frustrated little kid. There was only so much time before the others realised he-

"Eddie? Eddie!" He froze as his own name echoed through the trees from the tents behind him. Fuck, they knew he was missing now and they were gonna come straight here and they were going to stop him and then he'd never get to Richie in time, and who knew what the atmosphere was like in that ship or if he was even still alive...

Eddie looked up at the gray-black ship, a curve hanging in the air against all known laws of physics, and whispered through his deadened tongue, "help me."

As if he'd said the magic word, a cylinder immediately emerged from the bottom of the ship, moving perfectly smoothly and coming to a stop exactly in front of Eddie as if momentum didn't exist. A panel slid open, revealing a hole just large enough for Eddie to get in and look back out at the trees as Bill and Ben barreled through them towards him, yelling his name, before the panel slid shut and it was dark.

Please don't be dead, Eddie thought in Richie's direction, please just be standing there when I step out in your dumb glasses and your ugly shirt and I'll love you forever, just don't die. I love you.

Eddie had to squint when the panel opened again; the air ahead of him was pure white and, despite having had no sense of motion in the pod, he was undoubtedly up in Maturin's ship. He steeled himself to step forward, not wanting to breathe in whatever the gas was but seeing no other option. When he did step forward, his foot took longer to hit the ground than it should-

I cheer as Ben's dam holds and the river is stymied, and you grin at me, young and vibrant in the sun.

-and he stumbled. He reached out to grab something, anything but-

The car slides several metres to the side as I am rocked in my seat, Mike's call still connected through my Bluetooth headset. I am watching you pretend not to cry as Bev walks down the aisle towards Ben.

-there's nothing to catch him so he falls to his knees-

I am climbing into the hammock. You are climbing through my bedroom window. I am sitting in a Manhattan apartment all alone.

-on the spongey floor I can't distinguish from the clouds of gas around me, which follow my movements like water caught in the undertow of an oar. I gasp it in, ripping open my cheek once more, terrified of my lungs, of my traitor body, until I am sure it is not going to kill me instantly. You would have said, there's only one way to find out and you would have been right. That thought spurs me to my feet once more, wobbling in the uncertain gravity.

I clamp a hand over my cheek to try and mitigate the stretch but I am still is set alight when I yell, "Richie?" I try again, blinking away tears, "Maturin! Richie!" I have no idea how far through the fog I can see until Maturin appears, bigger than it had ever seemed and further than it had ever been from the screen.

"Maturin," I say, "please, where is he? Is Richie okay?"

Maturin makes a flutter-stone noise, then another. It sounds unhappy, but I have no idea what it means. I wish I had brought my drawing pad.

Maturin comes closer and I see now that it is 30 feet wide at least, that each of its fin-limbs are bigger than my whole body. It flutter-scrapes again and I wonder that I'm not going deaf, standing this close to a noise that loud. Then I look up and there are a few giant semagrams floating above me.

 _Write-here Eddie Maturin B_.

"How?" I ask desperately, and now blood is dripping onto my top, "I don't have..." I trail off as the semagrams overhead melt downwards, becoming an ink rain until they're upon me and I can see they're simply a black gas. I trace a finger through the cloud and it leaves behind a fading impression. I write as quickly as I can. _Richie exist-here not-hurt query?_

A huge semagram overhead and Maturin makes a gurgling noise. _Not-exactly-yes sorry_ , which fades, and then, _not-hurt Richie-conditional understand-here goal-process-of-Eddie_.

"That depends on why I'm here?" I am at a loss. "Then why am I here?" _Goal-process Eddie this-ship query?_

_Goal-object Richie._

"I know I'm here for Richie," I say, "and going round in circles won't help me- fuck!" My left hand, wet with blood, drops from my face as another spike of pain rips through my tongue. No matter, I can just write faster now. Why am I here? I catch the falling ink and ask, _goal-process Maturin this-planet query?_ The blood trailing from my fingers makes up part of each semagram.

Maturin doesn't flash up a million semagrams this time, or the original answer. It doesn't say anything at first, and I really hope it's considering its answer deeply. _This-ship near-future hold-process-end specific-unknown_.

Fuck my cheek. I read each sentence out loud as I translate, trying to get some meaning out around that unknown semagram. "Something is on this ship that will escape soon."

 _Specific-unknown many-humans many-Maturin previous comparable death-cause_.

"It's going to kill a lot of people, like it... Like it did before with your people." I write a small, reddish-black, _sorry_.

 _Understand Mike-only specific-unknown death-cause_ , then, _do you-only specific-unknown death-cause_.

"Mike is the only one who knows how to end it and... I'm the only one that can do it?" I haven't really got to grip with pronouns in Maturin B yet so I write my most practiced semagram, _clarification-need_ then attempt, _specific-you many-you either_.

 _Specific-you 7-marker_.

I see us in the clubhouse Ben built when we were children. I write all our names as a question.

 _Yes_.

I watch Stan pass you a baby with a pyramid of curls as we all wait outside a hospital room. "Why us?" _Reason query_.

 _Most you process-need_.

You hold my hand and we are in the Barrens as adults; you are wearing the shirt I bought you. I won't ask Maturin for clarification on that pronoun. "I'm going to die." _Specific-unknown Eddie death-cause soon_.

I don't add a question marker but Maturin writes back, _yes_. _Maintain do Eddie goal-process query?_

"Yes, I will do it anyway," I say. _Yes_.

Maturin writes a lot of semagrams I don't know, but the ones I do catch are _many-humans_ and _alive-body_ and _thank you_. I don't wanna talk about it.

 _Now-location Richie tell query?_ I write. "Will you take me to him?"

Instead of writing, Maturin scrapes out a moan and I feel gravity shift around me, like back in the screen room only this time it lifts me gently into the air and along in the wake of Maturin's half jellyfish, half sea turtle motion. It would be pleasant, like floating in a warm bath if not for the smarting pain in my head and the entirely unpredictable context.

I see you first in the distance - a distance impossible given what I know to be the outer dimensions of this ship, but who's counting at this point - as a faint smudge against a huge grey wall of what seem to be fossilized wooden stakes, a geometric impossibility that could not be real, behind which there is nothing but black. This is a translation. It is simply a darkness and the darkness is alive, but more than alive: it is full of a force - magnetism, gravity, perhaps something else - and you are trapped against it like a fly that wasn't fast enough to avoid the fly-swatter. I know that whatever it is, this thing my mind is showing to me as a wall, it is the thing that escapes and it is this thing that kills me.

"Richie!" I yell, and I am flying closer and closer, picking up a speed I know is responding to my desperation so I keep shouting your name, blood trailing behind me, "Richie, Richie!"

I rocket to a stop next to you and you are barely alive. Your eyes are still that terrifying fogged white and your neck and limbs are limp, your whole body is, and you are drifting slightly in some unknown current even as your leg is trapped between two stakes; where it passes between them, I can see all the bones and veins and capillaries in your shin, as if you have shot halfway into the maw of the world's strongest X-ray machine.

"Eddie-bear, Eddie baby..." Your mouth moves but it is not your voice that comes out; the words I can hear aren't even properly synced with the movements of your jaw, like you are nothing but a badly handled marionette. I recognize this voice. "You're home, pumpkin, you're here!"

There's something holding your foot, a hand, a human hand, pudgy and sallow, a thick wrist fading back into the darkness, a wedding ring cutting off the circulation in one finger that has become blackened and dead. I feel panic rising in my throat.

"You're here and you'll always be here for me, come a little closer, teddy bear, give me a kiss! I'll kiss you back, I'll love you back, just the way you've always wanted!"

The rot on the ring finger grows and spreads, eating away at the flesh until the hand is like a corpse's hand, gangrenous and filthy, yet it still holds your ankle and you're slipping further into the wall, something dark swirling in your vacant eyes. I grab your hand and you do not respond.

"Let's go Eddie-teddy-care-bear, come with me, we can be together forever down here," the terrible voice shrieks, the hand shrinking, becoming the unblemished grip of a child in a yellow raincoat, "we can make a baby and raise it as our own and it won't matter that we're perverts because this is eternity and you are lost in it, lost forever-"

Help me, I think, tugging on your hand and losing the battle but loathe to touch you with my other, bloodied hand. Then I shout, "help me, please, I promised I'd help you and I will but please help me!"

"There is no help, you foolish little boy!" It is bellowing now and I am worried your jaw will break with the force it is pushing through you. "You are eternal now and condemned to wander in the black... After you meet Me face to face, that is."

For a terrified second, I think, there is nothing I can do. It's right. I am going to die so why bother? What can we do against fear such as this?

I look at your face, slack and terrifying in its absentia. There is nothing to be done but follow the course I know is laid before me. "I'll see you again soon, mom," I tell the voice. I take your other hand too. My blood is smearing from my fingers to your wrist and it is floating all around us. I say, "come on Richie, let's go." And I pull us out of there.

In the pod taking us back to the ground, your eyes clear in a slow process of defogging, pupils and blue-grey irises fading in from the whiteness until they are your own again. You look up at me as I cradle you, both of us slumped against the curved wall.

"Eddie?" You ask, "what just happened?"

"Nothing, I just," we are both whispering in the dark. "I remembered something." Tears fall from my check onto your face and they take longer to fall than they should.

"What was it?"

"I'll tell you everything later," I lie. "Hey, genius, look around you. We're in an alien spaceship!"

You barely have the energy to lift your head. "Pretty fuckin' cool," you say. "What is up with your face, dude?"

"Nothing, don't worry about it, I-" I have to say something, anything before I do it, because this could fuck you up forever. It's easier for me, I don't have to live without you. "Richie..."

"Eds..." You are so beautiful. I wish I could give you this choice.

"If you could suddenly see your whole life, start to finish, would you change things?"

You furrow your brow. "Maybe I'd say what I felt more often. I- I don't know." You look briefly, uncharacteristically ashamed. It's a terrible look on you, so I kiss it away.

Back in the tent, Eddie refused to leave Richie's side so they set up the sleeping bags on the floor of Stan's med tent and settled in for the night. With the beep of Richie's heart monitor keeping time, Eddie told them about the ship and about writing with Maturin and about how, sometime soon, they will need to come back and fight whatever it is that awaits them. He explained that Maturin showed him his childhood and how the gaps he'd carried all his life were actually filled with the people in this room, and Mike cried like a child with relief and regret. He begged for forgiveness but they all already had. At some point, Bev took Eddie's hand and he squeezed back, suddenly aware of all those years they protected each other and the first real heartbreak of his life when she'd moved away.

She told them all, in a hollow voice, how she'd never felt right after leaving Derry, that she'd jumped from abusive relationship to abusive relationship until she's married the worst one of all. "But I'm never going back," she said fiercely, looking right at Ben. "Not now we're all back together."

Ben talked about his big, lonely house in Alaska. Stan explained how his life had been defined by anxiety, hands rubbing over the scars they'd all seen on his wrists. Bill spoke about not attending his father's funeral and how he paid for his mother's assisted living but hadn't seen her in 20 years. Mike just cried until they were all in a bit of a dog pile, folded around each other to comfort him.

"I wonder what Richie remembers," Ben asked after a while, after at least half their group was asleep. Eddie himself was only half conscious.

"Of the ship or our childhood?" Stan said quietly.

"Either," Ben said, "but I don't think Eddie told us everything that happened up there."

Stan didn't reply to that, or Eddie just fell asleep, but either way he awoke the next morning to Bill shaking his shoulder, everyone scrambling to get their shoes one. "Maturin's ship," Bill was saying urgently, "Eddie, it's leaving, quick!"

They'd all ran outside by the time Eddie sat up.

"Eds?" Came a croaky voice from the dentist chair and Eddie shot to his feet, at Richie's side within seconds. He'd awoken in all the hullabaloo.

"Richie, you're okay, hey," Eddie was holding onto Richie as tightly as Richie was holding onto him. "Welcome back, man."

Richie smiled, eyes searching Eddie's face like he was trying to memorise it, squinting slightly without his glasses. "What happened? I touched the screen and then..." His voice was dry and tired but it was his own.

"You missed quite a lot, really." Eddie couldn't stop grinning and his face was tired already, unused to the movement. "Maturin's leaving, you wanna go watch?"

"It's leaving?" Richie sat up, shocked into lucidity. "Holy shit. Was it something I said?"

Eddie helps him into a new t-shirt and his shoes and they lean against each other as they walk down the river to better see the black ship floating impossibly away.

So here we are, on the riverbank, in the middle of the story. You're in your brown t-shirt, the sky is uninterrupted blue now the ship has faded from view, and the grass is golden this late in the summer. I will tell you what happened in Maturin's ship, but later. First, I'm about to tell you I love you.

I'll answer any questions you have about the past but I won't ever tell you what I know of the future; I don't want you to try and change anything because I know this is the only way it's gonna work. I'm sorry about that. Maybe if you had some warning, you might be able to deal with it better when I die, but I think you'd just be tortured by the prospect before it even happens. I don't want to be selfish, but I can't waste the last three years of my life being miserable. If I do it this way, we're happy, at least for now.

You are so strong and so kind and I am going to give you so much to live for, even after I'm gone. Stan's kid is going to call you uncle; I doubt she will remember ever having met me. Maybe you'll finally take up Ben's offer and go live in Alaska with him and Bev after I die, I don't know. But I have every confidence in you. I will die. You will keep living.

Like I said, this is the middle of the story. I can see it all, start to finish, and I wouldn't change a thing, but even now I'm not sure which variable this path is defined by, pain or pleasure, what I'm minimizing or maximizing. I think of a broken arm and wonder that it can't be both.

Like I said, I love you.

**Author's Note:**

> > "Nothing lasts forever," Richie repeated. He looked up at Bill, and Bill saw tears cut slowly through the dirt on Richie's cheeks.
>> 
>> "Except maybe for love," Ben said.
> 
> thanks to joe [kaboomslang](https://www.archiveofourown.org/users/kaboomslang/pseuds/kaboomslang) [skinks](https://www.skinks.tumblr.com) for the post that sparked it all and ate up a week of my quarantine time ^^
> 
> i wanted to write this because i think theres such an overlap in their themes , with arrival about the acceptance of the inevitable and with it about the horror of time passing . i wanted to include more of it's fear and horror elements , but i was just too tired of reading about and living through homophobia lol so instead i just let richie be as gay as he wanted and avoided eddies whole sexuality crisis . maybe one day ill be less lazy and go back through and pepper in mike's moral dilemma re: knowing about their childhoods and myra / sonia's looming presence over eddie before the last scene . probably not . i think we all need a little less fear and horror in our lives atm
> 
> i am only a baby linguist and i am absolutely not a physicist , but i love both subjects v much , so if u are and u spot any inaccuracies in this , hmu !!! i love to talk about the heat death of the universe and the language families du monde . but any and all comments keep me alive
> 
> find me at [thisisagaysonlyevent](https://www.thisisagaysonlyevent.tumblr.com) pretty much twenty four sev these days
> 
> thanks for reading , hope ur staying safe wherever u are , love u x


End file.
